THE REBEL AS TRAGIC HERO

a study of

The Plague by Albert Camus

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

by

Betsy Greenleaf Culbertson

Submitted a3 an Honors Paper in the

Department of English

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

1968

Approved by

Director

Examining Committee

**-

CONTENTS

1. The Pattern of Tragedy 1

2. Hero, Universe, Catharsis 16

3. The Measure of Artistic Success , 64

CHAPTER ONE

THE PATTERN OF TRAGEDY

One of the most riddling of all literary genres is that which is

called tragedy. The term "tragedy" has been used to describe all sorts

of serious literature, of varying degrees of excellence, throughout the

artistic history of Western man. However, to the ancient Greeks, who

invented the genre, tragedy had distinct and highly refined character-

istics of composition. It was a particular art after a recognisable

pattern. The pattern of tragedy was analyzed by Aristotle in his

Poetics, in which the Greek philosopher based his discussion on the

works of the three masters of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and

Suripides. The essential principles of the Aristotelian definition,

crucial of a development of any understanding of the art of tragedy,

are adequately summarised by a modern tragic theorist, Oscar Mandel, in

his A Definition of Tragedy: "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an ac-

tion which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, concerning

the fall of a man whose character is good, appropriate, believable, and

consistent, whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity,

but by some error or frailty; in language embellished with each kind of

artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of

the play, with incidents arousing pity and fear wherewith to accomplish

the catharsis of these emotions."

The Greeks, according to the axiom* of Aristotle and the examples

presented in the extant works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides,

envisioned tragedy as re-creating pulsating action which moves a hero

through conflict from static existence to his destiny. This conflict

appears to be realised in the confrontation between aspiring, flawed

\ Definition of Tragedy (New York, 196l)fp. 214-5.

nan and a fathomless, omnipotent universe. Greek tragedy began in

religious ceremony; in its development as literature, its configuration

continued to reflect the thought of the Greeks on the relationship

between man and the universe. The tragic universe might be benevolent,

as that of Aeschylus, inscrutable, as that of Sophocles, or hostile, as

that of Euripides, but it had to be more powerful than the hero and un-

known to him. Tragedies, for the Greeks, were the histories of men who

confront their universe and who fail to conquer or understand it, but

who do endow themselves with honor by the supremacy of their effort.

These men are exceptionally subject to hybris, extreme pride, which

makes them extraordinary men, yet which is unforgivable for its effron-

tery. The concept of hybris is central to Greek tragedy, which explores

the conflict between the aspirations of the human will and their frus-

tration by God or Fate.

The plot proposed by Aristotle as the most appropriate metaphor

for the confrontation between man and destiny is the story of a great

change of fortune, preferably a change from good to bad fortune. Thus,

by definition, the the action of a tragedy is linear, never circular,

A tragedy traces the cause, nature, and universal significance of a fall

which is symbolic of the ultimate failing of every human being to com-

prehend or alter his destiny. Tragedy, for the Greeks, was therefore

the finest art form, since it explored artistically their beliefs about

the nature of man and his relationship to his cosmos.

Since the fall of the Greek tragio hero served as a metaphor for

human limitations, it was the inevitable outcome of any tragedy. Greek

tragedies such as the Orestela and Oedipus Rex march with horrifying

2Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor, 1967) p. 38.

certainty from the hero's confrontation of his destiny to the resolu-

tion of the drama. Given the hero and the implacable universe as they

are the final reversal of the hero is implicit In his actions from the

moment of his first choice to do battle with Fata. Fate is the ruler

of the Greek universe, and in Greek literature of man versus the uni-

verse its judgments are final. Inevitability of the defeat of man is

central to Greek tragedy; it prevents the resolution from being ironic.

As far as the Greek tragedians were concerned, the whole of a tragic

play might be ironic except the conclusion, whose absoluteness was one

of the defining characteristics of its tragic quality.

However, Greek tragedy does far more than trace the course of an

inevitable fall. It studies the cause and universal meaning of that

fall and finally judges the justice of it. It expresses its judgment

by placing against irreversible destiny an indomitable hero. Oedipus,

Antigone, Orestes, and Iphegenia cannot accept the situations in which

they find themselves at the openings of their dramas, so they choose to

struggle to put those situations right, constantly questioning each

obstacle they encounter in the course of their effort and defeat. The

value of the hero as a human being acts as a countervail in Greek tra-

gedy to the inevitability of the fall. Aristotle emphasized this fact

by demanding that the hero be a man of honor and idealism.? He must

be a sympathetic and noble soul who falls not as retribution for delib-

erate wrongdoing, but from failure in his conscientious attempt to act

rightly. The specific sort of failure to which the Greek tragic hero

must succumb in summed up by Aristotle in the use of the term hamartia,

'Ibid.

I*

error or frailty. Hamartla is a structural necessity for tragedy;

wrong choice is a means for the hero to advance the action and force

a resolution for the drama. It is also an aesthetic necessity, since

it is the capacity for error on tha part of the tragic hero which dis-

tinguishes him from the saint, another heroic figure, the tragic flaw

in Aristotelian tragedy is then a dramatic symbol of universal human

frailty.

In any Greek tragedy the dramatic conflict represents the tension

between the inevitability of Fate, representing the incomprehensible

justice of the cosmos, and the eminent goodness of the hero, repre-

senting the human race. These two values are put into conflict in an

attempt to resolve them into justice. The tension between inevitability

and free, conscious, heroic effort is described by Aristotle in his con-

cept of catharsis.5 He pinpoints the result of the tension in the

parallel emotions of pity and terror aroused in the audience by fine

tragedy. Terror in Greek tragedy is allied structurally to the inevi-

tability of the fall; pity ia allied to the admirable nature of the

hero's character and the illusory hope that he might be victorious.

At the end of an Aristotelian tragedy these emotions are purged by a

resolution of the conflict which is both necessary and just. It was an

artistic principle for the Greeks that tragedy end in final tranquil-

lity. It is through catharsis that tragedy continues to be meaningful

to an audience beyond the end of the play.

The pattern of Greek tragedy, exemplified by Aeschylus, Sophocles,

Ibid.

Ibid. p. ifOff. 6Judah Bierman, James Hart, and Stanley Johnson, The Dramatic

Experience (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1958) p. 3©7.

and Suripides and defined by Aristotle, is that of the contingent,

questioning power of the hero, pitted against the permanent, oppressive

power of the omnipotent, incomprehensible universe, and resolved in

justice.

The nature of the traglo hero, a3 established by Aristotle's

rules, and the nature of the traglo universe, as mirrored in the plays

of \eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Are clear enough. In general,

modern tragic theorists, whose views of the cosmos and of man are

similar to those of the Greeks, agree with them. However, modern

tragic theorists have greatly amplified the bare Aristotelian sketch

of the necessary emotional content of tragedy without altering the

artistic principles of Aristotelian tragedy itself. Modern tragic

theory has, in particular, disengaged the basic, general Aristotelian

principles from the mass of exclusive rules imposed on them by critics

since the Renaissance. It has adopted Aristotelian concepts of hamar-

tia and catharsis with clarifications, but without changes, and has

introduced the neo-Aristotellan demand for taagic exaltation.

The best modern articulation of the concept «f hamartla is that

of Arthur Miller, expressed in his controversial essay, "Tragedy and

the Common Man." In his defense of the common man as tragic hero,

Miller reduces the idea of hamartla to its essence: "The flaw—or

crack in the character—is nothing, or need be nothing, but his in-

herent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives 7

to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status."

With this conception, Miller goes against centuries of criticism

demanding a recognizable "sin" or "flaw" in the hero, but he does

Arthur Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man," New York Times, Feb. 27, 19^9, Sec. II, p. 1, •

not contradict the Aristotelian concept.

In the same essay, Miller also treats the subject of catharsis,

returning its source to the search for justice, despite the long-

standing belief of Christian critics that catharsis occurs in the reve-

lation of a system of cosmic justice which pre-exists. Miller sees

pity and terror aroused by the fierce onrush of any feeble, but deter- o

mined individual against the massive, adamana cosmos. He roots the A

catharsis of these two emotions in the intensity of the struggle, as

did Aristotle himself in expecting the catharsis to come from the

"incidents" of the action.

Furthermore, modern tragic theory has extended the role of cathar-

sis in tragedy along Aristotle*s own lines. Catharsis is now considered

to produce not only a sense of tranquillity for the spectator, but also

to leave him exultant, if the defeat of the hero is to be adequately

compensated for. It is this tragic exaltation, according to the neo-

Aristotelians, which makes clear the distinction between tragedy and

irony. Tragedy asserts, paradoxically, that the tragic fall is the

most splendid of all human efforts, it finds spiritual consolation In

the greatness of man at the nadir of his desapir. The most vocal of

the advocates of tragic exaltation, Joseph Wood Krutch, maintains that

the essence of tragedy is exaltation of the human mind and spirit, and

that tragedy cannot exist in a society which does not primarily affirm

the value of the individual.10 For Krutch, catastrophe provides man

Ibid.

?Ibid. *, 3, 10 'Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Tragic Fallacy," in The Modern Temper

(New York, 1929) p. 122.

7

his greatest occasion for grandeur.11

The concept of tragic exaltation is seen by neo-Aristotelain

Krutch as having its roots in the granduer of the herois figure. Mr.

Krutch takes Aristotle's use of the term "magnitude" to mean that the

hero must have extraordinary social status. He feels that such status

is a prerequisite for the exaltation which tragedy is supposed to

evoke, and that social greatness of the hero is the necessary objective

correlative for his greatness of soul. He maintains, in "The Tragic

Fallacy," that the loss of social status along with the death of the

gods has dealt tragedy a mortal wound,12 This argument has been rein-

forced repeatedly by suggestions that the convincing drama of kings can-

not be reproduced in a democracy}3 However, the questionable assumption

behind these arguments is that without the objective correlative of

kingship there can be no creation of a sense of human greatness. Mr.

Krutch feels that although great-souled men must still exist in potan-

tial, their human majesty cannot be adequately comprehended without the

14 extreme freedom and fearful power of kingship.

Other neo-Aristotelian contemporary critics feel that exaltation

is not rooted in wonder at the hero's superiority, but in personal in-

volvement with his intense struggle.15 For them, the fact that any man

can resist the impersonal determination of his destiny is implicit in

11. Ibid. 12 Ibid, pp. 115-W.

13^TKSppiC*Tragti and the American Climate of Opinion," in Two Sfc'i.5i& Traces, ed. John D. Hurr.il (New York, 1969) PP. 29-30.

14 Krutch, p. 133.

15 These critic, include John Gassner, Judah Bierman^Stanley John- son, James Hart, Henry A. Myers, George Boas, Oscar Mandel.

Aristotle'* theory of tragedy, end they feel that this very resistance

produces exaltation. They admit the need for an objective correlative

for nobility of soul, but they stoutly maintain that if exaltation is

a cardinal principle for tragedy, its source must be literary rather

than social. They insist that there are other realities than kingship

in modern life which are capable of producing, if not awe, then at least

respect mingled with sympathetic pride. John Gassner, for example,

states that "man's scientific mastery over nature [and his] confidence

in being able to order the universe according to scientific hypotheses

and mathematical formulas" provide him with dignity}-6 Others have sug-

gested that tragic dignity stems from the intensity of living or insis-

tent purposefulness rather than from social power.17 Arthur Miller, in

"Tragedy and the Common Man," offers the following explanation of the

achievement of stature by the modern hero: "But for a moment every-

thing is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in the stretching and

tearing apart of the cosmos the character gains •size,' the tragic sta-

ture which is spuriously attached to the royal or highborn in our

minds."18

Certainly tragedy produces a spirit of exaltation is presenting a

struggle in which a hero is able to ward off disaster even for a moment.

The form by definition grants the hero ennobling power and makes his

heroism extraordinary~his defeat, then, tragic. It is clear, then,

16 John Gassner, Theatre at the Crossroads (New York, 1963) P- 56.

'Bierman et al., p. ^*93» „ . m--„~jv. Henry A. Myers "Heroes and the Way of Compromise," {"JUttfe'

Vision and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (San Francisco, 19637

PP' SCVMSZI, A Definition of TraRedy (New York, 1961) p. 103.

18"Tragedy and the Common Man," p. 3.

that Implicit in the Aristotelian definition of tragedy is its capa-

city to exalt. Neo-Aristotelians have clarified and enriched the Greek

philosophers*s analysis with this contribution to the effort to under-

stand the art of tragedy.,,

In the effort to develop a system of tragic principles, modern

writers of tragedy have a far greater task than reinterpreting Aris-

totle in the context of modern civilisation. The elements which com-

pose Aristotelian tragedy, the great silent cosmos and the single strug-

gling soul, still exist in modern literature. However, the demanding

complexity of modem society has separated aan from his universe, and

the vast accumulation of knowledge since the Attic Greek period has

fragmented that universe and debilitated the hero. It is up to modern

trageduans to determine which of Aristotle's values are archetypal for

tragedy and to find the manifestations of them in the modem world. In

addition, it is up to them to discover which in the welter of contem-

porary values are valid new contributions to tragic art.

The twentieth century is at this time just beginning to qualify

for tragedy, as individualism and humanism are asserting themselves

against the weight of nineteenth-century determinism. The theme of

frustration of the individual is still prevalent in modem literature;

few writers have gone beyond it to tragedy. Rootlessness, fragmenta-

tion, weakness, and sterility are obsessively present, debilitating

courage to foolhardiness and scorning hope as escapism. Contempt for

a bourgeois culture and the cult of the superman have elevated out of

reality aost of the recent French literature which might be termed

heroic. Socialism, naturalism, and Freud have tended to confine the

American tragic impulse to propaganda drama and case history litera-

10

ture. Even a poet with the tragic potential of Eugene O'Neill has

decorated his heroes with complexes or obsessive physiological drives

rather than making them truly tragic.

The rise of science has had a drastic effect on metaphysics,

pushing man from the center of the cosmos and reducing him to a mass

of physico-chemical urges with no cosmological dignity. This fact,

above all, has led a number of contemporary critics to deny tragedy any 19 present or future. They argue that the death of the gods, who appear

in tragedy in the form of an active universe which is a worthy opponent

for man, has reduced the tragic battle to a quibble. This is the thesis

of Joseph Wood Krutch's "The Tragic Fallacy," already referred to,

whose salient points are as follows: 1. The tragic fallacy is the as-

sumption that the cosmos is aware of man's aotions and is affected by

them. Because this has been put into grave doubt by science, and

because belief in it is necessary for tragic exaltation, tragedy no

longer exists. 2. The proper objective correlative for nobility of

the human soul is kingship. Since this is no longer a reality, tragedy

may be admired as a lost art, but not produced. Its thrill must now

be vicarious because it depends on a stable monarchy which has become

an impossibility. 3. The literature of thejLittle man has arisen

because man now feels himself important and his feelings animalistic.

Exaltation no longer exists in life and thus cannot be approximated in

tragedy, k. Attempts to suggest new forces against which man is

defenseless have produced nothing more important than disease (as in 20

Ibsen's Ghosts) and disease is too commonplace to be tragic.

19Mr. Krutch, George Steiner, Louis Bredvold, and others.

20Krutch, pp. 115-^3.

11

Despite the substantial accuracy of Mr. Krutch's appraisal, his

case is flawed. As John Gassner observes, he begins with the ques-

tionable assumptions that man's importance was so thoroughly believed

in in the past and that without cosmic relevanoe man is without human

dignity.21 Whether or not man is at the center of the universe, it

would seem, has really nothing to do with man's concept of personal

dignity, for even in the age of belief he never received acknowledgement

that his deeds echoed through the universe. The assurance that human

action is in itself the only thing in the universe of real, knowledge-

able value carries no less dignity and mueh more responsibility than

hopeful conjectures about man's cosmic importance. Whether or not a

great fall affects the universe* it certainly affects the whole of the

human world and will continue to do so. Science may have proved man

commonplace and mean, but, after all, man is the scientist.

Critical response to the peeeimism of Mr. Krutch has been the im-

passionad urge of a new humanism. Man's frail, but earnest effort to

impose an ethical order on his world, since such an order can no longer

be inferred from the cosmos, seens to many to be genuinely tragic. So

does his courage in the «ace of crushed beliefs and the necessity of

placing all the value in himself. Though tragedy has lost magnificence

for the reasons Mr. Krutch justly cites, it has not lost its essence if

its roots are in the human condition. Tragedy cannot exalt the gran-

deur of man if the grandeur of man does not exist except in high tra-

gedy. Therefore, if there is grandeur in the act of living, the art of

tragedy will continue to reassert itself as an expression of that

grandeur.

uassner, p. 56 •

12 22

According to the now humanist critics, " that reassertion has

already begun. Many would say that Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and

the Sea is a tragedy of inevitable overthrow and the indomitability of

man, and its hero is a starving Cuban fisherman. The tendency of the

moderns is to what Mr. Gassner aptly labels "low tragedy." * This

variant of the genre contains a tragic metaphysics and exhibits a tra-

gic action, but lacks the literary richness of Greek or Shakespearean

taagic expression. The degree and quality of exaltation are less in,

for example, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman than in King Lear,

which has somewhat the same pattern of plot and theme. The Miller play

is not necessarily less tragic than that of Shakespeare, but it is 2k

tragic in a different way and clearly less fine a tragedy. Ambiguity

of the tragic conflict, the diminished importance of awareness, the O-f formal s1-n.4*r«j

abasement of language, and the insignificance^ all of which are appa-

rent in the Miller play, are characteristics of low tragedy.

Traditionalists maintain that such a form as low tragedy is artis-

tically impossible, that the terfK'low tragedy" is self-contradictory.

For them, tragedy is a calue, a pinnacle of artistic achievement •

striven after by serious poets. 5 This sort of criticism giving the

term "tragedy" honorific overtones is dangerous. The tragic impulse

may be implicit in the hu»*n condition, but that does not make it

sacred. Tragedy is not a static art; its plot metaphor must evolve

22John Gassner, Brooks Atkinson, Eric Bentley, William G. McCollom, Oscar Handel, Herbert J. Muller, C. I. Glicksberg and others.

-Gassner. p. 64. 2Wd. 2fcrutch, p. 139.

Handel, p. 6. William G. McCollom, Tragedy (New York, 1957) P« 3.

13

reflecting the changing reality of human life, if tragedy is to remain

a meaningful genre for artistic expression. The pattern of hero,

universe, catharsis does not change, but the dramatic correlatives

of those abstract coneepts vary with age, country, and particular

poet. As a fluid literary genre, tragedy flourishes or declines ac-

cording to how insistently the times demand a definitions of the rela-

tionship of man to his cosmos.

The new twentieth-century humanism of the rebel is clearly an

attempt to endow microscopic, mechanistic modern man with the ability

to combat a universe which remains omnipotent and has become, with the

death of the gods, inscrutable. The demand that man force an ethical

order on the silent cosmos is identical to the Greek demand that man

argue against the Fates. The cycle is complete; the insistence on the

nobility of any human soul in a life-or-death struggle is the same des-

pite the gap of 2500 years. This nobility is maintained by both soci-

eties as a countervalue to cosmic silence, and the conflict of these

two opposed values is recognised as fact. An inscrutable universe and

a brave, noble man seem, then, to be the archetypal antagonists in a

tragedy. The cathassis produced by .a resolution of their conflict is

an artistic demand. Tragedy must resolve the conflict as life does not

resolve it, with justice. Final exaltation, the tragic vision, the

tragic spirit, is a psychological demand of the spectator. The pur- 28

pose of any art is affirmation; art must fulfill a human need for

expression of some positive value. The art of tragedy is that is turns

26Richmond Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, 1959).

27Herbert J. Muller, The Spirit of Tragedy (New York, 1956).

28. Krutch, p. 123.

14

physical defeat into psychological triumph.

For modern men, as for the Greeks, tragedy attempts to fulfill a

need to express the metaphysical values of a culture. It is a symbolic

dramatization of the human condition, of man's irremediable suspension

between the animals and the angels, of the discrepancy between man's

possession of a destiny and his inability to control it. As Albert

Camus expressed it, "The work of art is situated at the point where the

desire for transcendence and the impoesibility of transcendence tson-

29 flict." y

In the face of this horrifying discrepancy, tragedy is assertive.

Its beginning is in the repudiation of passive acceptance. Again, it

is Camus who is the spokesman for the modern tragic hero. "I continue

to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that

something within it does have meaning, and that is man, because he is

30 the only being who insists on having it.M

The rhythm of tragic action is the linear movement from abstract

assertion to concrete commitment, then through the course of a pur-

poseful, agonized, questioning struggle which ends in a predestined

defeat, but which also produces understanding. Kenneth Burke«s rhythm

31 of "purpose, passion, perception" is the pattern revealed. ' If, then,

tragedy requires purpose and passion, it cannot be written in either a

period of complacency or in one of despair. It is the product of man's

troubled intelligence when his society is neither complacent nor des-

29Albert Camus, quoted in Germaine Bree, Albert Camus (New York,

1964) p. 48.

3°Albert Camus, Lettres k un ami allemand (Lausanne, 1946) pp. 72, 73. Translation by this author.

31John Gassner, "Tragic Perspectives: A Sequence of Queries," in

Hurrell, p. 18.

15

perate, but is basically good and conscientious, although plagued by

injustices. The tragic poet condenses such a sympathetic, but fallible

society into one man, the tragic hero, whose drama follows the pattern

lust described. Through the battles of the hero, the drama reveals the

nature of the universe against which he struggles. The final choice of

the hero and his last beliefs at the moment of destruction purge terror

and pity. The magnitude of his struggle and the sincerity of his mo-

tives exalt and inspire the spectator. Hero, universe, catharsis, and

exaltation are, then, we may assume, the qualities in tragedy which are

archetypal. Their presence determines the tragic power of any serious

literature. Expressed and explored in conjunction, they form the pat-

tern of tragedy.

CHAPTER TWO

HERO, UNIVERSE, CATHARSIS

16

Tragedy Is, first and foremost, a heroic literature. It is the

drama of an indiviual in his struggles with an obdurate universe. The

use of a hero concentrates the dramatic action of tragedy within a

single, symbolic soul. The hero serves as a mediator between the

audience and the cosmic forces against which he is set, and he is also

spokesman for man, since his values are meant to be believed in and 1

since, his faults bring to his situation his own human fallibility. It

is through his coming to an understanding of this fallibility that

catharsis ia engendered.

The tragic hero is well defined in character, both by structural

necessity and by tradition. He is the Initiator of the tragic con-

flict, a man who forces static Fate into imbalance in order to judge

it.32 He remains in all respects an enlargement of the ordinary man, -

but for him moral values are extraordinarily significant, self-knowlddge

is the primary consideration, and honorable commitment is the justifi-

cation for existence. He is great in soul, though eminently fallible,

highly individualistic, exceptionally subject to pride (hybris) and

rigid in his idealism. His tragedy is that his pursuit of his highest

values will lead inevitably to his suffering and death. He always

finds an answer and pays terribly for it. It is mistakes and wrong

choices, or self-sacrificing right choices, in the grim pursuit of self

and identity in the cosmos which make tragic heroes.

The tragedian makes drama from the hero's confrontation with self

in-the face of death and from his struggle for self-mastery. However,

the heroic effort is twofold—first the hero must realise a self,

32Bierman et al., p. 5W. 33Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957) p. 209.

17

second he must undertake a tragic mission to establish an identity for

that self in his surroundings. The plot follows the hero's searches

for self andfcurpose intellectually; the poetry and emotional rhythm

of the conflict plumb his soul. The hero is both a thinking and a

feeling being; thought helps him to define the suffering he feels and

feeling makes his intellectual struggle meaningful.

The hero's search foe self may be undertaken actively or contem-

platively. The active hero, according to a modern theorist, William

G. McCollom, is "precipitate, headstrong, hot-blooded and heedless, as

Coriolanus, King Lear, Brand, Oedipus." His unregenerate pride and

courage make hi* heroic He comes to a slow awareness out of stubborn

blindness and meets doom with defiant revolt. The contemplative hero,

as McCollom describes him, is "grave, reflective, analytical, brooding

and self-tormented as Hamlet, Brutus, Richard II, Michael Ransom, and

Suripides' Orestes."35 The contemplative hero is the saint who hesi-

tates ia doubt, for whom the choice is withdrawal or commitment.

It is commitment, precisely, whieh unites thought and foiling in

the hero and helps him to extend his personal search for self into a

representative search for identity. The same insistent purpose fulness

which drives the hero to seek self-knowledge drives him to his fatal

tragic choice. It is Oedipus' desire for the truth, Macbeth'; need for

secure power, Fhedre's passion for Hippolyte, the very characteristics

which involve them vitally in living, which make their heroism tragic.

Critics who claim that the art of tragedy is dead base their argu-

ment principally on the clafcn that such men aa these no longer exist.

y*, McCollom, p. ^3.

35 Ibid.

18

These critics feel that extremity ef action end rigorous adherence to

virtue are contrary to the modern temperament, in particular that the

decline of an outwardly imposed system of absolute morality has made

virtue too pereonal to carry heroic weight. Science, for them, is

the villain. Advances in the study of psychological motivation and

behavior, which have tended to nagate the belief that the intellect

controls behavior, have shrunk the individual, as far as these critics

are concerned, to a cog in a aachine, so that he is totally incapable

of making a quest in the grand style. They point, with justice, to the

literature since the scientific revolution. Modern writers, unable to

believe in the old heroes, have offered bloodless protagonists who are

either literary supermen, removed from the flow of their times, or

semi-perceptive animals, so realistically socially motivated that they

inhibit the imaginations of their creators.

A few modern writers, however, unable to make heroes of flawless

supermen or insensitive brutes, have introduces a new sort of hero, the

little man raised to representative status. The little man as hero is

a result of the attempt to find heroism, whiah is based on superiority,

in a social system in which inequality of rank is a negative value, and

where, therefore, he must manifest greatness of soul without the helpful

objective correlative of greatness of rank, which is what Mr. Kruteh

says cannot be done. Defenders of the little hero deny Mr. {Crutch*s

judgment that, because he is not of the caliber of the old hero, the

little man is tfctally unheroic. They point out that he is susceptible

to the same passion, suffering, and coming to self-awareness as a king,

maintaining that since the characteristics which make heroes are present

36, Kruteh, p. 138f.

in smaller measure in the ordinary man, the ordinary man can be drama- 37 tised convincingly as a hero within his limited universe. Th» little

hero stands as a symbol, and a justification, of the way things are.

Little men are the heroes of Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, Arthur

Miller's A View from the Bridge and Albert Camus's The Plague. Camus,

in fact, defends one of his secondary characters, a harmless, uninter-

esting civil servant named Joseph Grand, as the real hero of his novel.

'•Yes, if it is true that men persist in proposing examples and models

of what they call heroes, and if it is absolutely necessary that this

narrative should contain one, the narrator offers, as is just, this

insignificant and overlooked hero who had to recommend him only a little

goodness of heart and an ideal which seemed ridiculous." Such a hero

as Grand is inarticulate and small, but he is capable of reason and

passion, and when he commits himself to something, that is at least a

beginning of tragedy for him.

The very fact that modern writers are able to find little men

heroic is the strongest argument that the ideal of heroism is not dead,

and modern writers such as Albert Camus and Arthur Miller maintain both

in their theoretical essays and in their works that modern man is as

heroic as ever, if not more so. They admit that modern tragic heroes

have lost traditional grandeur because of the pressure of science upon

the modern poetic imagination, but theyoannot feel that that imagination

has been destroyed, because for them the tragic vision is at the core

of human understanding of existence and because, as C*nus explains in

37Tha most concise argument for JmUM* •".I*? n*y * found in Arthur Miller's -Tragedy and the Common Man.

3QAlbert Camus, La Pest. (Paris, 19*7) p. m. Translation by this author*

20

39 The Myth of Sisyphus, life is preferable to suicide."

Miller and Camus feel that though modern tragic heroism may be

absurd, since it can hope for no recognition from the cosmos, it has

continued to exist, having changed its aim from eternal meaning to tem-

poral. It has deliberately limited itself to the existential. This

sort of tragic heroism is difficult and demanding and offers no com-

pensation but the personal satisfaction of having done one's job. It

is immediate, making no demands on the eternal, or even the temporal,

future. It takes its values from the moment and its movement is from

act to act. It does not admit reconciliation and is resolved only in

death. Its necessity, its ultimate value, is revolt. Because the

value of revolt is in itself, the result of the tragic action is insig-

nificant. It may lead to lucidity and ordering of values for the hero,

as Camus has it do for Bernard Rieux in The Plague i it may end in blind

collapse, as for Willy Loman in Miller's Death of a Salesman. The com-

mitment of revolt is not far-reaching, but it is total in its intensity

because revolt is in itself the only value undeniably known. Since the

scope and depth of revolt, and of any other human action, are the

measures of value, the modern tragic hero gives himself worth by the

creativity of his living.

The modern tragic hero, as Camus and Miller very similarly en-

vision him, faces the hostile or indifferent cosmos and faces it in

defiant revolt against that very hostility or indifferenoe. Yet his

revolt must be positive and have as a resolution the establishment of

some value, even if that value is only the inherent worth of the revolt

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York, 1955).

21

itself^0 The pattern of the literature of revolt, then, seems to be

hero, universe, catharsis. The configuration of the drama of the

rebel is the same as that of the drama of the traditional tragic hero;

therefore analysis of the eonfiguration as it appears in the literature

of revolt is the necessary first step to discover whether or not this

new kind of literature is in reality a new kind of tragedy.

Albert Camus's The Plagws and Arthur Miller's teeth of a Salesman

are both dramas of rebels at the deepest points in their struggles with

the absurd modern world. The Plague treats the sudden, violent attack

of bubonic and pneumonic plague on the Algerian city of Oran and traces

the course of the citizens' organised resistance against the disease.

Although the reader is not aware of the fact until near the end of the

novel, the story is told by Dr. Bernard Rieux, a quiet, thoughtful,

serious-minded medical man who takes on the plague as a personal anta-

gonist. His struggle with it provides the basic dramatic conflict.

Dr. Rieux's fierce commitment to the defeat of the disease is emo-

tionally harrowing to him. He suffers mightily with the death of a

young boy whose cure alow would have convinced him of his worth as a

doctor and thus as a man. Later he loses to the plague his best

friend, Tarrou, and, indirectly, his wife. In the course of his at-

tempt to understand the nature of the plague and his own relationship

to it, he realises in the face of genuine suffering that fatalism

cannot work for him, and he affirms the ultimate worth of hi. selfless

dedication to healing.

D«th or . MB— " "" ,tory °f *n ***** Jto,•^l0"r, tr"*Une

»i.«.n> mm *—. » fc""1"' •"* ™°*°°*** M*** ""■• m **

*°c«.. ««*- i« **— ™«— S*^1EM^ (Lo,>don, 1966>

p. 181.

no longer physically capable of carrying out his demanding job and is

slowly becoming senile. In the course of his discovery that he is a

useless cog in a machine which muet progress, Willy is forced to the

realization that he has failed not only as a businessman, but also as

a human being, specifically as a father. He pleads with his boss to

be allowed to continue working, since he is making an honest effort to

fulfill his ideal of the Salesman, only to discover that the ideal is

shabby and is based on the false god of Success, to which he has al-

ready sacrificed his sons Biff and Happy by forcing them into the world

of his dream. In a frantic struggle to discover whether or not the

dream actually has been false, Willy learns that Biff's early disillu-

sionment with his father has prevented the dream from possessing hia

as it has possessed Happy. Ecstatic that Biff still has a chance to

be a success and overflowing with paternal tenderness, Willy makes the

jenereus decision to smash up his car, so.that his son can collect on

his twenty thousand dollar insurance policy and so that he himself, in

dying, will be given a shred of dignity by having left behind something

worthwhile in his son.

It is apparent that the action of both The Plague and Death of a

Salesman is that of a conflict which is serious and complete. The

prime mover in the oonflict in both novel and play is a hero, a rebel,

who is introduced to the reader at the point at which he must make a

critical decision whether £&. not to engage in warfare with his fate.

The two works trace progressively the courses of the lives of these

heroes as assertive decision leads them to conflict, from conflict

through intense suffering to a final resolution—for Rieux, rededica-

tion, for Willy, suicide.

23

Camus and Millar hava both developed their heroes in detail, since

both works are experiments in the possibility of modern tragic heroism.

They have shown these men in their relationships with their worlds;

they have described the problems they, must face and the questions they

must ask; they have endowed them with personal human frailties and also

with exceptional virtues. By analyzing the worlds, problems, and char-

acteristics of Bernard Rieux and Willy Loman it is possible to discern

what constitutes the heroism of these men for Camus and Miller and to

discover in what measure that heroism belongs to the tradition of

tragedy.

In all tragedy there is an interplay between the hero and his

world. The search for self is simultaneous with the search for an

identity, a function in a given surroundings. 4s a dramatic character,

the hero is an unstable force in a world whose processes of change he

can only partially understand and little control. He plays the dan-

gerous game of living fully under the unceasing threat of annihilation.

Thus he lives at peak intensity,-enjoying the instant. " The action of

his drama is the confrontation with the universe, about which he knows

nothing except that it is about to crush him. The universe confronts

him with a dilemma, forcing him to make a critical choice whether or

not te enter into direct warfare with it, and he chooses to fight. It

is the course of the resulting battle, ending in the defeat of the hero,

which provides the pattern of action for any tragedy.

The morality of tragedy lies in the extent of the hero's respon-

sibility to the larger order. The universe of traditional tragedy

represented the will of the gods or of destiny, so that the hero was

% loCollom, pp. 9-1° •

L

defying higher powers in resisting that will and earned in some

measure his defeat. The modern universe, as Camus and Miller envision

It, is still as powerful an oppressor as the ancient universe, but it

is no longer cognizant of man. Their heroes, therefore, have a new

and terrifying responsibility toward it. They are no longer required

to obey the universe, as was the Aristotelian hero, but rather to do

everything in their power to thwart it. Thus they make their own tra-

gic morality in the face of universal indifference.

Since no battle can be waged against an indifferent opponent, the

universe enters tragedy in the form of oppressive evil which negates

and destroys human aspiration. As Camus explained in Resistance,

Rebellion, and Death, absurdity and death are not ends, but they must

be beginnings for the modern generation, since they are at the core of

the post-World War II world view. Because they are what we know,

they alone will werve as a source of new positive values, the first

of which is Camus*s own revelt.

The world 6f the modern tragic hero is one of present evil.

That evil must be dealt with on its own ground; the modern tragic view

does not depend on an afterlife justice. The evil must be arbitrary,

but never malicious, since maleficence is personal and the universal

antagonist is impersonal. It must play no favorites, mete out no jus-

tloe, and leave unmerited suffering in its wake. For this sort of

evil, an ideal objective correlative is plague.

The disease itself in The Plague is not corrupt or sordid; it

is cruel and inexorable. "The grim days of plague do not stand out

like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguiihable, beaconinf. a,troubled

^Rertstance. Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O'Brien,(New

York, 1961) p. 59.

25

sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous

thing crushing out all upon its path." The plague is death and

destruction, the brutal presence of human mortality, and by extension,

the symbol of man's arbitrary existence and transience. It contrasts

tormentlngly with human conscious frailty and gratuitously devastates

will power without even providing very much wisdom to its survivors.

However, what vision it does provide is the basis for the new tragedy

of the twentieth century. Of course, as Camus points out, the suf-

fering induced by the plague far outweighs any insights it may bring,

but if it must be endured, at least it forces self-knowledge. Also,

it does produce heroes, if not victors, in the handful of men who

maintain the impossible battle against it.

Willy Loman confronts an unsympathetic fate in his slow loss of

strength, vitality, and intellectual control. TRe clutch of old age

which figuratively paralyzes him is made more cruel by the abundant

capacity of society to function without Willy Loman. His abilities,

thoagh they were minor at best, are not missed by his company, and his

dream of the Salesman is mocked by all as a pttiable delusion. Willy

is not attacked directly by a symbolic universal force, as is Rieux by

the plague, but his personal failures are laid bare by the world's ig-

norance of his values. Willy fails as a man because of his pride and

his blindness, but he fails as a businessman because the image he has

created of what a businessman should be is ignored by the higher

powers in the business world and because mortality actually intrudes

on his life by depleting him of his physical powers. In part, at

%» Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 19W) p. 163.

l± Paste, p. 101.

least, Miller presents Willy Loman as angered combatant of an unjust

fate.

Universal evil is an old aspect of tragedy which both The Plague

and Death of a Salesman present, The Plague much more directly and

significantly. However, to universal evil, Camus and Miller have

added a new miedern oppressive force, universal indifference. The

universe is not always hostile; it is often merely irrational in its

lack of regard for good and evil. Man, in a struggle to comprehend

divine justice, discovers that his existence is of no importance to the

movement of the spheres or to his social milieu. This is what Willy

Loman is sentenced to discover, which affects him far more deeply than

the uselessness which old age brings upon him. Willy's world is not

even cognizant enough of him to engage him in battle, as does the uni-

verse of Rieux in the form of the plague. When Willy becomes irrele-

vant to his world with age, he discovers that he never was important

to it. Willy's failure in itself is tragic, but the play is an ar-

tistic conundrum, because as a totality it is ironic. Willy has been

asked to forsake his natural talents for gardening and carpentry to

succeed in an unsympathetic career. He revolts with a dream of how

that career could still make a man a champion, but even Willy's

leisurely, velvet-slippered Dave Singleman is sacrificed to mechan-

istic efficiency. A greater power than any individual ideal rule.

the world of the dieoontented salesman, the giant of Success and Pro-

gress, which arbitrarily triples both valuable and invaluable soul,

in it. march to an unknown end. Willy', war to make hiaself count

is as useless a. Rieux'. war on disease, and both are revolt. ag.ln.t

the hostility or indifference by which the universe reflect, i*. di.-

27

regard for man.

To revolt against universal hostility or indifference is a neces-

sity for the tragic hero. He must Impose the order he needs, even on

a world which takes no heed of him. He must continue to martyr himself

for higher values, although no God gives any indication of caring for

what he chooses to die. This revolt may be absurd, to use Camus's own

term, but if one is to consider the word in its original sense, the

sense in which eminent scholar Henri Peyre feels that Camus uses it,

absurdity is a discord, a note out of place, a slip in a steady pro-

gression.^ To create this sort of absurdity is the very role of the

tragic hero; it is up to him to throw universal equilibrium into im-

balance for re-evaluation. This makes nobility of absurdity. It is

why suicide is not preferable to life, why "one must imagine Sisyphus 46

happy" even as he gazes into the void.

Absurd heroism, then, copes with a world which cannot be changed,

by forcing action upon it as if change were feasible. The ability

actually to change the universe would surely substantiate the dignity

of man, but to accomplish such a change is impossible. Rieux and

Tarrou cannot cure the plague because they are saddled with human lim-

its, but in joining to do their best to cure it they have at least

accomplished unification and stimulation of others. Camus understands

and glorifies this accomplishment. "I maintain my human contradiction

in the faoe of the underlying contradiction of existence. I set up my

lucidity in the midst of that which denies tt. I exalt man in the face

of that which crushe. him, and my free, necessary revolt, my passion,

"5Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today (New York, 196?) p. 318.

46 Albert Camus, The {firth of Sisyphus, p. 91.

28

47 ■re reunited in this tension, this lucid, this boundless repetition."

Both Dr. Rieux and Willy Loman react against their new, arbitrary,

senseless, fallible worlds by working their hardest as cross purposes

with those worlds. Through the effort, which is worth only Itself, the

protagonist makes the progress which the universe does not, evaluating

both his world and himself while calmly tracing his way down a blind

alley. Camus and Miller both begin their works assuming an intrinsic

meaning in the action of living. The ethic proposed by them is self-

definition, an effort to prevent despair by refmsing stagnation. Camus

scorns the spectator and honors the actor, demanding that his heroes

48 reach toward involvement. The amount of effort is the measure of

man. Rieux knows nothing more about the nature and cure of plague

after its departure than he did at its outbreak, but he has acted, and

that is all that is asked of him.

Counteraction to universal hostility or indifference by the hero

may take many forms. Those reflected in these two works are revolt,

responsibility, and reaffirmation. These three movements represent the

spiritual growth of the protagonist and the journey of every tragic

hero from terrible choice to comprehenstion and from comprehension to

final peace.

The first reaction of the modern hero to a hostile or indifferent

universe is revolt, which is a peculiarly modern element in tragedy.

Rather than by the old transgression against a just natural order, the

modern tragic hero brings on his defeat by challenging an unjust or

indifferent order on its own terms. He loses, not because he is at

47

48' Ibid, p. 65.

John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (New York, I960) p. 128.

fault, but because he is not strong enough to win. Rieux cannot pre-

vent the deaths of children; Willy cannot make his boss Howard Wagner

accept his dream.

Tragic revolt springs from the comprehension of human suffering

and condemns the powers which permit that suffering. It challenges

the right or wrong of the powers that be. It may or may not produce a

result; it cannot if it challenges the universe directly, as does the

revolt of Rieux. But what revolt does accomplish is to make man»s

voice heard beyond the passive acceptance of the animal world. Camus

calls revolt the defining principle of humanity. "I revolt, therefore

we are." The tragic hero must vigilantly defend his freedom by re-

fusing to be crushed mindlessly. This refusal is what makes half-

conscious Willy Loman a hero; he may not be fully aware of all the

nuances of his situation, but he is cognimant of a terrible wrong, and

he fights against that wrong with all the forces of his half-mad mind.

The effort to change man's plight is souBe enough for tragic exaltation

despite the inevitable defeat. Man«s insistence that he ought not to

die is a new shade to the comprehension of the humanoconditlon which

fits s godless tragic universe, just as the idea of redemption fitted

the universe of believers. Revolt attempts to impose justice on a world

which is presupposed to be without it, and it has calm confidence in

its ability to do so. Tarrou must fight for the plague victims if he

can do no more. For the moralist, revolt is a duty, and Camus is a

moralist. Willy must kill himself to give his son the opportunity to

realize the Loman ideal of success. Miller proposed the necessity for

^Albert Camus, L'Homme Revolts' (Paris, 1951) p. 36.

30

51

nan to ask, "Why?" as axiomatic for tragedy.^° "why?" in itself pre-

suppoees dissatisfaction with the giwen order. It is revolt.

The particular tragedy of existential revolt is that it is hope-

less, as his intelligence warns the hero. Revolt is without compen-

sation except that it fulfills a need to prove the greatness of man.

It imbues life with an intensity which consummates the heroic mission.

This positive belief, the illusion that the effort will have some

effect, is the source of catharsis and final peace which overrides the

climax of frustration in existential tragedy. The tragic fallacy of

Krutch is still, in spirit, operating in the concept of the intrinsic

value of useless revolt.

Camus maintains that there is a harmony between revolt and love.

It is the presence of a love for humanity which differentiates the

struggle of Rieux from the sterile struggle of Oreste in Jean-Paul

Sartre's The Flies. Love is what brings into being stage two of the

heroic act, personal responsibility. The heroio urge of the existen-

tial tragic hero to assume responsibility for diminishing the world's

suffering is what exalte his revolt. After all, Rieux and Tarrou return

willingly to Oran after their swim. To persistent queries as to his

motive in feeling persoaally guilty for each plague death, Rieux has

sure responses. He has learned humanism from suffering;-' his code of

morals is comprehension;^ the only means afc his command as an indivi-

5Arthur Miller, letter to Sheila Huftel, quoted in Sheila Huftel, Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass (New York, 1965) p. lH*.

5"Camus, quoted in Michael Mohrt, "Ethics and Poetry in the Work of Albert Camus," Yale French Studies, no. 1, p. 117.

*Camus, The Plague, p. 118.

5ibid., p. 120.

31 54

dual is battle; the road to peace for him, the true healer, is the

path of sympathy." Aa Astute contemporary critic, C. I. Glicksberg,

maintains that affirmation through responsibility in the face of despair 56

is in fact the tragic vision, . and Antoine de St.-Exupery echoes this

conception of responsibility producing tragedy, "To be a man is pre- 57

oisely to be responsible."

It is apparent that part of the tragic decision is the conscious

acceptance of the burden of others' suffering, and three methods for

tee hero's doing this are advanced by Miller and Camus—sainthood,

healing, and sacrifice.

The responsibility of sainthood is represented in The Plague ky

the character of Tarrou, an enigmatic soul en a search for justice

which me learn he undertook after seeing his attorney father argue a

defendant to a death aentence. Tarrou desires only to carry his per-

sonal figurative plague bacillus without transmitting it to others,

though he does learn in the course of the novel that he also owes it to

the oppressed to fight for them. However, sainthood such as this is

not vigorous enough for tragedy and Tarrou is not the kind of hero

that Rieux is. Tarrou seeks an ideal state for man where injustice

and impurity of action do not exist. He has chosen .withdrawal from

reality and cannot accept man's inhumanity to man as existing and

natural to the animal. While his motives are sterling and his values

of great worth, Tarrou himself realises that he has set his sights

5* Ibid., p.122. 55.

Ibid., p. »30. 56C. I. Glieksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth-Century Liter-

ature (Carbondale, 1963) P« 51•

57Terre des Hommes (Paris, 1939) p. 59.

32

lower than Rieux, who has asked of himself the capacity to defeat

the tragic reality of the human condition as he understands it all

too well. Between the ideal of sainthood and the ideal of compassion,

the tragic hero of Camus is to choose compassion.

The healer, idealized in The Plague in the person of Rieux, is

thus a more compelling leader for the world*s sufferers than the

saint, Esther than seeking idealistic answers, he remains in active

revolt against evil throughout the course of the tragedy, committed at

all times to the alleviation of the tragic reality of suffering and to

the denial of the tragic necessity of death. Rieux has chosen to ig-

nore the problem of salvation and concentrate on the healing of the

ill, a task about which he can, at least, be sure. Instead of living

in estrangement for the sake of his ideals, as Tarrou does, Rieux the

healer has chosen to live within society's constrictions without giving

up those ideals, in the hope that by the example of his living they

will be integrated into the world to guide it forward. It is a humble,

unassuming heroism, but it is not to be budged from its commitment and

it cannot understand men who can walk away from evil. Rieux gives

medicine and understanding to the people of Oran at the cost of his

wife's love and his best friend's life, and the only motive he claims eg

is "common decency.1* His only compensations are the occasional ex-

hilaration of szving a life and the meager satisfaction of having done

his job, even if the effort was not successful. Although Camus admires

tho ethic of the healer, he has not made the road an easy one for Rieux.

The doctor, the committed rebel who boars the responsibility for saving

the world from human mortality, is tho great tragic hero who must

58 Camus, Tho Plague, p. 150.

33

strive so that others may be happy, as Rieux comes to understand in a

conversation with the discontented and restless journalist, Rayaond

Rambert.

"Man is an idea, and a precious small idea, once he turns his back on love. And that's my point; we--mankind—have lost the capacity for love. We must face that fact, doctor. Let*s wait to acquire that capacity, or, if it's really beyond us, wait for the deliverance that will come to each of us anyway, without his playing the hero. Personally, I look no farther."

Rieux rose. He suddenly appearred very tired. "You're right, Rambert, quite right, and for nothing in the world would I try to dissuade you from what you're going to do; it seems to me absolutely right and proper. However, there's one thing I must tell you; there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting the plague is—common decency."

"What do you mean by common decency?" Rambert*s voice was grave.

"I don't know what it means for other people, but in my case I know it consists of doing ray job."

"Your job,! I only wish I were sure what my job is.'" There was a mordant edge to Rambert's voice. "Maybe I'm all wrong in putting love first."

Rieux looked him in the eyes. "No!" he said vehemently, "No, you are not wrong."59

The responsibility which Rieux assumes for Rambert's happiness is

heroic in the most exalting measure, and in fact it bears a close

resemblance to the Christian doctrine of vicarious atonement.

The third means of assuming responsibility is that proposed and

chosen by Willy Loman, sacrifice. The hero of tragedy is archetypally

sacrificed; in fact, he wields the knife himself, consciously and not

without hesitation, so that his decision becomes heroie., Purposeful

and useful self-sacrifice, in the tradition of Oedipus, is the ultimate

taking of responsibility. Sacrifice ends the battle before defeat; it

takes the universal law into its own hands and exalts the hero's mani-

pulation of his own fate. In addition, sacrifice is the only respon-

59 Ibid., pp. 1^9-50.

sibility which permits transcendence; the tragic sacrifice leaves a

legacy of enlightenment, freedom, or power, or of all three. Willy

Loman's death has the recognizable result of producing wealth and

therefore liberty for Biff. The fact that Willy is worth more dead

than alive is indisputable. Whether or not Willy actually realizes

the fact, he purchases Biff security for the dream. He does not kill

himself to escape. It has been made clear from the beginning of the

play by Linda Loman that he had tried non-sacrificial suicide on

several occasions with no success. Willy does not exhibit the intel-

lectual dignity of Miller•s John Proctor in The Crucible, but neverthe-

less both men martyr themselves for ideals in a corrupt world—Proctor

in stony silence, Loman in vocal revolt—and the fact of Willy's self-

sacrifice in itself is certainly tragic. Miller began Death of a Sales-

man with the intent that Willy should sacrifice himself, not be sacri-

ficed by higher powers. His struggle is resolved in the final con-

frontation with his rich adventurer brother Ben, the incarnation of

Willy's dream, a scene in which Ben brings up the subject of the insur-

ance. Money has meant the realization of the dream in Ben, although it

is a value belonging to the world against which he is fighting, so

Hilly accepts that value and destroys himself for it in the hope that

Biff can transcend it to attain the magnificence that Willy envisions

in him. It is, to be sure, a glad sacrifice without a doubtful falter,

a fact which detracts somewhat from its tragedy, but it is a positive

resolution to a period of terrible suffering and questioning for Willy.

Although Tarrou represents the responsibility of sainthood, Rieux

the responsibility of healing, and Willy Loman the responsibility of

6°Arthur Miller, Introduction to Collected Plays (New York, 1957) P. 25.

35

sacrifice, each of the three accepts both of the other forms of res-

ponsibility as well in lesser proportions. Rieux is as virtuous and

innocent a plague carrier as is Tarrou, and Willy is an unshakeable

martyr to the value of self, the value of likeability over the ability

to achieve material gains. Tarrou is a kind of healer, as is Rieux, .

and he is the driving force behind the sanitation squads, though healing

is not his first concern, and Willy's life is one long conscientious

effort to realize his dream in job and sons, miserable, misdirected

failute though that effort may be. Both Rieux and Barrou sacrifice

the inner peace of tranquil acceptance; Rieux denies himself a full

relationship with his wife and a deep friendship with Tarrou, prefer-

ring to both a commitment to mankind. All three find a final value in

their taking of responsibility by espousing an affirmative value to

which their efforts can contribute.

The compensation for revolt and for the assumption of crushing

responsibility is belief. The pilgrimage of the tragic hero, which is

the action of tragedy, moves from his first act of commitment to com-

prehension attained in struggle and from comprehension to exaltation.

The turn to exaltation in the character of a tragic hero is in his

assumption of positive values—outer, as Willy's dream, or inner, as

Rieux1s existential doctrine that human effort is always worth itself.

Tragedy, though it may be motiveless, is always moral in this regard.

Willy Loman goes to his death thoroughly convinced that his dream of

success was the right one. This is what gives him the strength to kill

himself, what makes his death a final rebellious affirmation rather ..

than a confession of failure. He has learned in the course of his

tragedy that his method was wrong and that he failed, but he refuses

36

to believe Biff's protestations that the whole dream was wrong.

In The Plague reaffirmation takes the form of humanism; the heroes

are "those for whom man and his poor and terrible love suffice." The

particular ethic which is espoused is the fact that all men are engaged

in the losing battle. Sharing in friendship the sorrow of lost bat-

tles, as the one for the Othon child's life, and the exultation of

victories, as in the cure of Grand, is what gives the struggle meaning.

Complete understanding and the vehenent refusal to become passive vic-

tims of the plague or permit others to become such victime are positive

achievements which remain in the wake of annihilating plague and cannot

be undone by its power. Fervent belief in these or any other affirma-

tives lifts a hopeless, pathetic, absurd battle to the status of tra-

gedy.

A capacity for reaffirmation is born in the hero through the trial

he undergoes in the play. He is tried as the universe places him face

to face with a particular enigma whibh he must come to understand,

whether or not he is able to solve it. Tragic literature is a problem

literature whose particular focus is on the nature of the problem and

all of its implications, its trial of the hero, and hiss reaction to

that trial. It is not concerned with the problems whose solutions lie

only in the reordering of social values, but those which must be re-

solved by understanding and reaffirmation on the part of the hero.

There are three traditional tragic problems which present themselves

to Rieux and Willy Loman in particular, those of alienation, suffering,

and guilt. Actually, they are three wariant formulations of the tragic

"Why?" as it appears in the lives of these two men.

6lCamus, U Paste, p. 2*1. Translation by this author.

37

The tragic hero, because of his idealism, is separated from the

current configuration of his society. Dissatisfaction with that con-

figuration is what is presupposed by his revolt. He is alone in his

crucial decision, tormented by the tension between his representative

and his personal desires. The basis of Death of a Salesman is Willy•s

isolation from his family as well as from his society. Homeless on a

battlefield, he is surrounded by strangers, whose relationship to him 62

consists of evaluation. Willy and Biff are unnaturally estranged

from each other, and therefore each is tragically isolated. Their

ideals are in conflict, their failures hurt each other, and their total

lack of mutual understanding forms the core of each of their tragedies.

It is an irrational alienation, the injustice of which sets Willy on

his quest, and it is never entirely resolved. They a»e at last about

to communicate in their final scene together, but Willy's decision to

commit suicide for Biff places the barrier of the dream ance again

between them.

Camus, because he was personally haunted by a desire- for silence,

by loneliness, and by an inability to communicate with those he most

loved,63 was deeply troubled by alienation, and it appears centrally in

The Plague. Rieux has a eelationship with his mother of a quiet, solid

mutual comprehension, but he is vaguely uncomfortable with his wife in

her illness and he remains incapable of fully understanding the values

of Tarrou, Grand, and Rambert. His mission is solitary because he is

the only true healer among them, and he pays for his commitment the

price of total loneliness. Camus also carries the concept of isolation

62

*

63 Miller, Introduction, p. 29.

Professor Claude Trail, Lecture (March 12, 1968).

38

to a metaphysical level. Oran Itself is alienated in its plague situ-

ation from the complacent world and from the silent cosmos. Camus*«

hero as well as Miller's must face the fact of his tragic solitude.

Both of them make the heroic choice between conventional acceptance

and lone revolt, and the road of revolt carries with is the agony of

alienation.

She central moral problem in which the tragedy in both play and

novel centers is the question of the justice of terrible human suf-

fering. In The Plague this suffering ia widespread and is induced

by the universe; in Death of a Salesman it is personal and'is socially

brought about in a single representative soul, but the passion of the

hero in the face of either sort of suffering is the same. Human suf-

fering is the dramatic configuration of mortality. In the modern view,

that suffering is unmerited and is without assuagement. Suffering,

because it is a life rhythm, has always played a role in tragedy, but

in the modern expression of the genre it has ckanged from a manifesta-

tion of divine justice to an act of war by the universe perpetrated

upon man. At the very least, its cruelty is a step beyond universal

indifference, and this cruelty evokes from Camus and Miller a positive

reassertion of man.- _

Suffering provides a maasure of the manhood of the hero. It tests

the sincerity of his commitment to revolt and the depth of his sense of

personal responsibility. An understanding of and a protest againat

suffering are necessary in tragedy, whieh is not a drama of unhe»itant

marytrdom, but one of trial and reaffirmation. The commonality of man,

for Camus, begins in his mutual suffering, for which the vicious plague

is such an appropriate objeotification. Rieux takes the suffering o€

39

the people of Oran with high seriousness and reacts to it with revolt

and personal acceptance of the fault for the plague's success in kil-

ling even one man. The ethic of healing which he espouses comes

directly from his medical contact with agony and death.

The fact that Willy Loman's growth through suffering to heroism

is wholly personal is the reason why the necessity of his anguish is

so difficult for many to comprehend. In Death of a Salesman there is

not the separation between victim and hero which exists in The Plague:

they are both contained in one man, and to the extent that he portrays

the victim, Willy's heroism is pathetic. This is how Linda regards

him when she begs for understanding for him. "He's not the finest

character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing

is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be al-

lowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention

must be finally paid to such a person...A small man can be just as ex-

hausted as a great man." In the tradition of tragedy it is Willy him-

self who answers her, making his suffering meaningful. He is far from

passive or broken under the blows dealt to him; he continues the at-

tempt to impose his ideal on his unreceptive, mechanistic surroundings.

He induces suffering in himself by his refusal to accept failure and

bears that suffering with dignity. His search for a place for humanness

in a world of money and merchandise is a noble, if painful, striving.

Hilly Loman's suffering only begins in the im personal blow dealt to

him by the company in stopping his salary. It takes form in his at-

tempt to realign his values and distinguish the right from the wrong

64 Miller, Death of a Salesman, in Collected Plays, p. 162. All

subsequent references to the play are to this version.

**0

ones and it makes a tragic hero of him. As Miller points out in the

Introduction to his Collected Plays, if Willy had not realized his

failure he would have continued to function cheerfully in his false

world until death, but he is crushed by his failings, drained by his

aloneness, and haunted by guilt, 5 so much so that he goes mad in the

attempt to restructure his values.

Suffering is the most precise means of describing the hero's

conflict and his resolution of that conflict which is available to i

the tragic poet of any age. Both Rieux and rfilly Loman, like Oedipus,

Macbeth, and Kin? Lear before them, make tragic pilgrimages through

suffering, in order to come to understand themselves and to define

their identities. They move through anguish to awareness.

Neither Death of a Salesman nor The Plague is principally a tra-

gedy of human guilt, but Rieux's and Willy's suffering is to a cer-

tain extent justified by their human errors, which also keep them from

being intellectual abstracts. Rieux is committed to medicine, but in

the course of his relentless search for a means of defeating the ab-

surd he has ignored his wife, as Willy has been unfaithful to hi. and

warped his sons. Both are, then, guilty to a degree. Rieux is not

perfect, but plague-stricken, as Tarrou maintains; the plague is a

part of him. At the beginning he* shared the complacency of all the

citizens of Oran, all habituated to a stale routine. His is not a

guilt of error, but one of apathy, because he allowed the plague to

enter his city and soul uncontested. Willy', guilt is concrete; his

life is a long series of errors and suffering for them. He has, in

the first place-, raised the importance of being well-liked ,to ideal

65. Miller, Introduction, pp. 3z*-5.

status and then permitted Biff's petty thievery, since it seems harm-

less and even helpful to such an ideal. He has deified ephemeral suc-

cess. He has lied to himself about his sons* abilities and his own,

and it is tragic necessity that that lie, represented by his brief

liaison with the woman ir^Joston, should be discovered by Biff, his

conscience and judge. Willy, like the most traditional tragic heroes,

falls because of error in his search for a higher value. Miller has

provided Willy with a behavioral norm in the person of Charley, and it

is the hero's own tragic error if he prefers to follow his own stan-

dards of behavior. Because Willy's decision to make his own rules is

based on pride, it is in the tradition of the tragic guilt of hybris.

3ut Willy's courage, his sincere effort to understand, and his un-

failing belief that the higher value he seeks actually does exist

redeem him from condemnation,.Just-as his guilt redeems him.from

pathos.

Each hero reacts to the particular problems he must face with

both archetypal and personal virtues and failings. Rieux and Willy

Feel alienated, suffer, and are found guilty a* they are required to

do as tragic heroes, but they also discover the roots of those problems

in their unique selves. The characterrof tragic heroes vary as pro-

foundly as the characters of human beings, but each hero does possess

certain distinguishable characteristics, the presence of which defines

his heroism. These serve as focal points around which his individual

personality is developed. These characteristics are a sensitive, well-

developed consciousness, an awareness of freedom and of the necessity

of choice, a sense of obligation baUnced with an ability to appraise

failure to that obligation, and indomitable will with which to serve

m that obligation, and a oertaln amount of repreeentative stature. The

particular manifestations of these characteristics in Bernard Rieux and

Willy Loman define them as tragic heroes in their values and needs.

Consciousness takes two forms in the mind of the hero. He begins

his struggle with a certain amount of self-awareness and sensitivity to

his surroundings. In this is eooted his proclivity to heroism. In ad-

dition,.in the course of his trial and suffering, he undergoes a spiri-

tual awakening which makes his awareness total. This awakening is that

which occasions the catharsis of the pity and fear that have accompanied

his battle.

It is a metter of great critical debate how much understanding of

the total situation this spiritual awakening should bring. A number of

crities demand that the hero arrive at total lucidity, insisting that

the final tragic resolution must *ake account of every part of the com-

66 plete configuration. Others maintain that full and accurate self- 67

awareness on the hero's part is not necessary 60 the tragic effect.

While a sudden recognition of the nature of his plight by the hero is

doubtless an excellent draaatic device in a tragedy, it seems probable

that such recognition need not be complete revelation. In the first

place, complete lucidity is superhuman. In the second place, what is

necessary is that the hero arrive at some sort of intellectual compre-

hension which satisfies him in his battle to know. It is irrelevant if

that comprehension is inaccurate, as long as it is clear and sure.

Nevertheless, some degree of self-awareness is undoubtedly needed. The

hero must be able to think, and think clearly, .ince tragedy is an in.

6^A thorough rationale for complete consciousness may be found in McCollom, pp. 50-1*

67The firmest advocate of variable consciousness i» Mandel, p. 148.

tellectual struggle. It is the capacity for thought which makes the

tragic exist. A tragic hero cannot by martyred in dumb ignorance and

must not act from urges, but from thought, if he is to make value

judgments. He must be aware of the nature of the destiny against which

he revolts and of the fact that he shares with all men the experience

of suffering. Tragedy is a thematic literature, and what gives theme

to human life is knowledge. As Miller puts it, the battle to know is

the peculiarly human effort to press order upon universal chaos.

Once knowledge is acquired it is useless for the furtherance of tragedy;

it is the end of a tragic configuration.

Rieux is traditional in his consciousness. He begins in com-

placency, is forced into suffering, slowly evaluates himself at the

sickbed, and articulates his conclusions in the long discussions with

Tarrou. His point of spiritual awakening comes at the death of the

Othon child, when he realizes that the amount of his effort must be

inversely proportionate to its success. He realizes that Tarrou's

death is the culmination of his friend*s sainthood and that Grand*s

cure is the sign of the value of Rieux'I own responsible revolt. His

tragedy ends in peace, as he prepares to do battle again with the

plague, knowing fully that that battle is the value of his existence.

In Death of a Salesman the amount of consciousness becomes the

measure of the success of the work as tragedy. Miller has presented

an unconventinnal, but not unprecedented tragedy of a search for know-

ledge which fails. This is the tragedy of King Lear, who is recon-

ciled, but never sanely lucid, or of Aeschylus' Orestes, who depends on

the intervention of Apollo to justify the necessity of his matricide.

68, Letter to Sheila Huftel, quoted in Huftel, p. 111.

44

•/illy Loman, in the Oedipus tradition, struggles with a slow movement

toward awareness, but his progress from blindness to clarity is inter-

rupted by his sudden self-sacrifice^ loyalty to a value revealed by

that awareness. The problem is that Willy never learns his dream was

false before he kills himself for it. This partial comprehension,

partial failure is perfectly in character Cor a hero like Willy, who is

terribly and honestly imperfect. He is not as aware of himself as is

an Oedipus or an Othello, but then he is not meant to have a great

mind. Willy's hazy,half-mad consciousness is often compared to that of

King Lear, although most critics maintain that Lear came to a fuller

self-awareness tksn //illy. 9 It must be observed, however, that Lear's

self-comprehension is accomplished poetically, through the metaphor of

wisdom in madness, while Willy's intellectual struggle goes deeper and

lasts longer before he too collapses into insanity. In addition, his

intellectual struggle is rooted in bewilderment. A clarity of mind is

contrary to the character of Willy Loman, although this limited con-

sciousness probably detracts from the exaltation of his tragedy.

Therefore, Miller settles for a play which is less tragic than it might

be, but which does approximate the tragic spirit. Thus Death of a

Salesman is a kind of low tragedy. The particular limits of Willy's

consciousness are the source and measure of his heroism. The play is

a study in a failing attempt at self-knowledge. It begins like King

Lear in total misconception, follows the growing awareness of past

error through suffering, and ens. abruptly at the point where hop. is

Lear," College English, XVII, (March, 1956) 341-5.

*5 discovered by Willy that the dream is not false because Biff has not

been paralyzed by its shortcomings. Willy kills himself without ever

finding his own best values. He does not exploit his new-found role

as a real father. He does not consider his cosmic value, as does

rtieux. He does not resolve his own inconsistencies of belief and the

contradictions in his oalues. First he condemns superficial heartiness

to Biff, then he praises the aggressive sort of salesmanship. He does

not admit that he has lived two lives, one actual, one imagined, and 70 .

he persists in confounding them. Moreover, there is the matter of

his insanity. The play is a chronicle of the increasing pressures on

Willy's mind, which force him to disintegrate before the viewer.

Structurally, Willy's schizophrenia summarizes his intellectual failing

and the totality of his suffering* it does not nullify his heroism,

since he battles furiously against going» mad throughout the course of

the play and apparently does not lose control completely until after

his decision to commit suicide. His conversation with Ben, though

imaginary, seems entirely lucid, and his final disconcerted dash about

his world before plunging toward his car is no more ludicrous than

Lear's wanderings about the heath decorated with wild flowers. let

madness is not tragic, and the problem remains: Is Willy tragic because

his drama approximates the Lear story, 0* is Lear's madness actually

pathetic?

It is possible to say that Miller's hero is aborted half-grown

71 because a life which is not examined is not tragic, and it is true

that Biff should be believed when he insists that Willy "never knew

7°Huftel, p. 108.

71Bierman, et al., p. i*93«

46 .72 who ho was." Willy is clearly inarticulate, and inability to ver-

balise the tragic conflict is highly unconventional for a tragic hero.

Miller, however, maintans that inarticulateness does.not detract from

Willy's tragedy. He feels that intensity of emotion forces Willy's

stale language into a resonance which compensates for its lack of

clarity. Willy is aware of the formlessness and failure of his life,

and, for Miller, this awareness and the sincerity of his desperate

search for his error and the values to rectify it are the qualities

which produce exaltation in Death of a Salesman. Miller places great

emphasis on Willy's refusal, however irrational, to compromise his

dream, and he asserts that his hero drives himself to death by choice 74

and does not fall into catastrophe by aimless wandering. Willy seems

clear of mind at the point of fiaal decision, though he cracks an in-

stant later. Freedom to choose does not depend necessarily on complete

cognizance of all possibilities and their ramifications, for such cog-

nizance is superhuman. Miller does not exclude enlightenment from his

tragedy; it is merely given to the survivors rather than to the hero, 1

as is the case with King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. The interesting

fact in Death of a Salesman is that the survivors' insights are all

limited. Charley doubts the ultimacy of Willy's dream; Linda cannot

understand the necessity of the sacrifice; Happy reaffirms the false

dream; Biff denie. his father's dream its just value because of his

disillusionment with Willy. However, it is to Biff that the most un-

derstanding and the new responsibility are givenv hBiff does gain

72 Death of a Salesman, p. 221. ?3Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (New York, 1967) PP. 16-7, 116. 74,

Miller, Introduction, p. 34.

*7

thorough self-awareness. He is determined to find the Loman identity,

which Willy could not find, although not through the dream of "being

number-one man" to which Happy will remain dedicated and in which he

will stagnate. Order is restored in Biff's real self-evaluation and

new commitment. He takes over Willy's kingdom in new wisdom, as Albany

and Edgar do Lear's,76 Willy's failure is summed up in the close of

his life. His success is embodied in Biff's commitment, which does not

fall prey to the illusory dream and has its own tragic reality.

The point at which the hero's consciousness begins to matter to

his tragedy is when he realizes that his universe is driving him and

that he must make a critical choice whether or not to accept the des-

tiny that it is forcing upon him. Being a hero, he chooses not to

accept a determined fatej botbjlieux and Willy Loman insist on making

their own destiny. Rieux manifests Camus's belief that freedom is

realized in lucidity and exercised in revolt. It is the actual exer-

cise of freedom which is Camus«s counter-value to human transience, and

Rieux«s effort to heal the sick is an act of free choice. Miller

emphasizes continual choices as the steps in his heroes' movement to

"self-justification."77 It is Willy's own choice not to be Charley and

to raise a Biff rather than a Bernard. His choice to commit suicide

is the fiaal step in the progress, when he realizes that his self-

justification must be accomplished through his son. The final suicide

attempt is a literary success because it is an act of courageous

choice.

75Death of a Salesman, p. 222.

76c 3Siegal, p. 3^.

77 Moss, p. 108.

48

The need to choose to be active rather than passive in the face of

destiny is what makes men heroes. The heroes of tragedy, then, contain

within their characters a particular need to act, in the form of some

sense of obligation, such as those which drive Rieux and Willy Loman.

Obligation to act, as Miller observes, is certainly not limited to

kings and provides common men like Rieux and Willy with a propensity

for tragedy. The obligation to act purposefully results in the wil-

78 lingness to sacrifice even life for human dignity.' The measure of

the dignity is the measure of commitment, of acceptance of the chal-

lenge offered by universal hostility or indifference. For Miller the

refusal to withdraw from a hopeless conflict constitutes tragic her-

oism; the ferocity of the struggle determines the amount of tragic

exaltation.79 The obligation to revolt proposed by Camus sterna fran

the same cardinal principle. Rieux is driven by a refusal to allow the

cruel universe to persecute and destroy innocents. He protests thi* by

his untiring attempts to save children from the plague; he bears their

agony with them, and he finds in sharing the victims' suffering the

strength to continue. He is obliged, like Sisyphus, to roll his rock

up the hill because it is a human accomplishment. Like Sisyphus, he

fails to produce any recognizable result by his effort, but he does.not

fail the obligation, which asks only that he create an intrinsic value

in action itself.

Willy Loman's obligation is to the realisation of what he thinks

is a higher value, which happens to be phony. It is an obligation to

78

79

80

Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man," p. 1.

Miller, Introduction, p. 7.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

which he is partly true and which he partly fails, as he is hot as pure

a tragic hero as Rieux. By espousing the dream he has broken the law

of the order which bans its realisation; thus his failure is predeter-

mined, although the order, as Miller adds ironically, is highly sus-

pect. Willy cannot duplicate the success of his brother Ben or their

father the enterprising flute maker. The day of the dream is gone.

fiilly is true to the dream in reasserting it over the corruption of

the society which has destroyed it. However, Willy also fails the

dream personally, because of his ignorance of his, and his own, false-

hood. Inseparable from the dream in the play is Willy's conception of

himself as an incarnation of it. He describes to anyone who will or

will not listen his exaggerated exploits and phenomenal sales on the

Mew England route. His disproportionate conception of his own.impor-

tance reveals a pride which is the modern dramatic correlative fur the

hybris of kings. With the realization of the falsity of this concep-

tion comes Willy's madness, because it is beyond his capacity to cope

with so mammoth a failure. To a certain extent, Willy's weak decline

to insanity, his failure, is compensated for by his monomaniacal reas-

sertion of the value of the individual: "I am not a dime a dozen.' I am op

tfilly Loman and you are Biff Loman.'" ' 3y refusing to surrender the

dream tfilly becomes tragic, forcing the conflict to resolution in his

own martyrdom. The dream may be vague, trite, stock, and shallow, but

it is his, and worth his life. Willy makes the tragic choice to defend

the belief he maintains tirelessly as real and right in the *ace of its

perpetual frustration. But Willy's obligation is twofold. In addition

81

82

Miller, Introduction, p. 36.

Death of a Salesman, p. 217.

50

to defending the truth of his ideal, he is also driven to compensate on

the moral plane for his personal failure of love. The ethico£ love,

represented in Biff Loman, I is, th* final positive value ia Willy»s

life, which counteracts the falsity of the ideal of success. The

failure of the dream resulted from the irrelevance of Willy*s value of

being well-liked. Willy's failure as a father resulted from his sub-

stitution of the desire to be well-liked for real love. The whole in-

cident of his marital infidelity is another example of the unsatisfying

substitution. Biff, discovering Willy, also confuses the two ideals

and rejects them both categorically. When Willy finally comprehends

the inadequacy of likeability he enters his moments of deepest suffer-

ing, and it is not until Biff confronts him with the reality of his

love that Willy is able to recognize that he was not a total failure as

a man. In his passion to compensate for the failure of his dream by

making love a success, Willy again confuses the two in his madness and,

instead of love, bequeaths Biff money. He returns to the ultimacy of

the ideal, hoping that love may make it work. His sacrifice is to

Success, the ideal he cannot truly understand, to which he has devoted

his life and to which he should, with tragic consistency, dedicate his

death. He realizes true value too late^ butdenies it, and chooses to

remain true to the old principle. It is Biff who receives transforming

insight to use his love as the basis for a new ideal. Willy chooses to

sell himself for twenty thousand dollars, believing to the end that the

psychological necessity which drove him was an ultimate value. Willy's

false necessity and has refusal to give up his blindness are new aspects

of tragedy wxplored by Miller, aspects which reflect the prevalent

ea Miller, Introduction p. 36.

modern attitude that all of tragedy is ironic because it is absurd.

3iff who vows only to make a concerted effort to do his best, is

of the new breed of tragic heroes like Rieux, who answer the irony

by denying that there is another way things could be. Their obligation

is self-limited; they cannot be concerned with ultimates, only with the

immediate value of doing one's job. Both sorts of obligation, inner

and outer, are tragic, as Rieux and Willy are two sorts of heroes in

their reactions to their obligations as they see them.

What makes Rieux1 s and WillyjLoman• s efforts to fulfill their obli-

gations climactic and exciting, what gives those efforts intrinsic

value, ate these two men's powerful forces of will. Will is one power

which social pressure does nfct neutralize. Miller feels that the art

of tragedy-is the effort of man to achieve full humanity, coupled with

the additional personal desire to leave a memento of what he has

achieved.^ Camus exemplifies this effort in his transcendence of the

absurd by affirmation. He calls upon man to deny his own perishability

to the last moment and never to act as if the fate imposed upon him

were just.86 He confirms his own finl belief by the assertion, "In

the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invin-

cible summer."87 This is the attitude of Rieux and Willy in the testh

of all the indignities forced upon them. Willy is free to protest to

the skies his dull insignificance. He is permitted to feel joy and

pride in Biff's acknowledgement of his love for his father, even at

"Tragedy and the Common Man," p. 3.

Miller, Introduction, p. 29.

84

Camus, Lettres, p. 65. 87Camus, L'Ete, quoted in Albert Maouet, Albert Camus; ou, In-

vincible 4t4 (Paris, 1955).

the low ebb of his sense of the dream's value. Willy senses the awful

dichotomy between what he is and what he ought to be, and endeavors his

utmost to resolve it. He dogs the dream until he can reaffirm it. He

is on a quest for truth—if weakly, at least arduously. He is determined

to surpass the evil that surrounds him, although his confusion paralyzes

his intensity. His inability to act decisively is part of his befuddle-

ment of mind. It is part of his particular tragedy that his capabili-

ties cannot match the power of his will.

Rieux is as positive as Willy, though he is in a struggle to

realize others1 worth rather than his own. "What's natural is the mi-

crobe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a op

product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter."

Rieux is conscious at all times and knows exactly how to act; his tragedy

is that he knows the limits of what sheer will can accomplish. Pri-

marily, it cannot cure the plague-striken. Yet Rieux drives himself in

spite of his knowledge, and it is for this reason that Camus exalts him.

Camus's source for an intrinsic value in human action is the invincible

and admirable human will. "There is more to admire in men than to des-

pise."89

The^ntensity of Rieux's and Willy's struggles with conscious

choice and obligation and their will power make them extraordinary men,

representatives of the human race fulfilling its greatest capacities.

To represent the race in such a manner is their principal function as

tragic heroes. Tragedy does not write of every man, but of Everyman.

Its hero, in his insistent asking of questions, should carry the weight

88 Camus, The Plague, p. 229.

89 Camus, La Peste, p. 2^7. Translation by this author.

53

of ell people and his answers must serve them. The question becomes,

how does a tragic writer compose a representative of man? Miller says

a hero should be a whole man, not a monomaniac, with recognisable uni-

versal characteristics which make his tragedy valid for all. However,

he finds it difficult to distinguish universal, ennobling character-

90 istics in a democratic society.7 Without an aristocracy, it is dif-

ficult to envision greater than average men. The concept of aristo-

cracy sustained heroic literature, since princes had not only power and

importance, but also royalty of soul. A prince's actions represented

the extremeties to which the greatest human spirit could rise or sink.

Royalty is such a workable basis for tragedy that many modern critics

have, as we have seen, avowed that it is a necessity. Yet is not tra-

gedy a painting with larger-than-life lines and bright colors of the

aame dilemmas undergone by every man? If not, then tragedy ia not

truly concerned with the human condition.

Yet some sort of stature for the hero is necessary fo distinguish

tragedy from ordinary life. This becomes a real problem when the hero,

like Willy Loman, is in fact an ordinary man. However, Willy's stature

is symbolic. His problem is so close to present reality tkat it is ter.

rifying. In a real sense, if Willy caves in under the pressure of Suc-

cess, so do all men.9* Furthermore, Killer's play suggests that even a

man as small as Willy is susceptible to the same torments as those of a

^reat spirit. Each member of the audience in part becomes Willy.

Miller emphasises this identification is his response to the welter of

criticism which states that Willy's ordinariness precludes real heroism

9°Miller, -On Social Flays," in A View from the Bridge (New York, 1955) PP. 8-9.

91firic Bentley, fci Search of Theatre (New York, 195*0 P- 81.

54

for him. He condemns the confusion of stature, which is emotionally

achieved by the hero, and rank, which is gratuitously handed him.

The question of rank is significant only as it reflects questions of the secial applicability of a hero's career. There is no doubt that if a character is shown on stage who goes through the most ordinary actions and is suddenly revealed to be President, his actions Immediately assume a much greater magnitude and pose the^ossibility of much greater meaning than if he is the corner grocer. But at the same tlae, his stature as a hero is not so utterly dependent upon his rank that the corner grocer cannot outdistance him as a tragic figure --providing, of course, that the grocer's career engages the issues of, for instance, the survival of the race, the realtionship of man to God~in short, the questions whose answers define humanity and the right way to live so that the world is a home instead of a battle- ground or a fog in which disembodied spirits pass each other in an endless twilight.™

Camus is in full accord with this view of the irrelevance of formal

stature» "In an absurd world the rebel has still one certainty;. it

is...the fact that the grocer and he are both oppressed."" Miller

fully intended tfilly to be heroic; he placed the judgment in Biff's

mouth when he had him call his father a "prince" to Miss Forsythe,

and v^th conviction.9^ In addition, he has endowed Willy with a number

of characteristics which critics have found to evoke profound respect—

95 the fierceness of his desire to understand what is beyond him, - his

96 courage to »ake any sacrifice for his dream, the sincerity of the

an drain itself, his power of imagination <tn<i his energy in pursuit of

92 Miller, Introduction, p. 32.

93Camus, quoted in Philip Thody, Albert Camus; A Study of his Worka (London, 1957) p. 116.

94. Death of a Salesman, p. 204.

95,

96

97

Siegal, p. 342.

Miller, Introduction, p. 31*.

Siegal, p. 3^5.

55

values,98 the depth of his agony and the height of his love;9 his

ride in the face of slights, and his demand for respect. Ben con-

siders him of significant dignity to be called William. It is appro-

priate for filler's plot that Willy be without social rank, but that

does not mean he is without inner nobility. He is simply the product

of an age which does not recognize social rank. The question of rank

is never raised concerning Rieux, although he is the son of a simple

workman and one of a number of doctors in Oran. His role as leader of

the plague resistance gives him a psychological extraordinariness which

Willy Loman lacks, but the two men manifest equal nobility of soul.

3ernard Rieux and Willy Loman face cold, powerful universes with

revolt, responsibility, and reaffinnation. They struggle manfully with

the problems of living. They exhibit the grand virtues of tragic hero-

ism and qualify them with particular, personal, human failings. They

quite match the standards for tragic heroism set for them by Aristotle,

Sophocles, and Shakespeare.

It is apparent, then, that both Albert Camus and Arthur Miller

have fulfilled the first requirement for tragedy, the presentation of

a particular sort of hero. They have produced in Bernard Rieux and

Willy Loman unique, compelling figures who are both characteristically

modern and yet universal in their needs and values, men who share

worlds, problems, and characteristics with the traditional heroes of

tragedy. They have made dramas of the lives of these men by putting

98Richard J. Foster, -Confusion and Tragedy: The Failure of Miller's Salesman," in Hurrell, p. 83.

99 Gassner, p. 63.

100,

101 Ibid.

Ibid.

56

then into conflict with particularly defined universes which also may

be seen to ehare many characteristics with the universes of Antigone

and King Lear. The bare cosmologies which both Death 6f a Salesman

and The Plague present, the hostile or indifferent worlds of their tra-

gic heroes which are distant, omnipotent, and unfathomable as to pur-

pose, give them a kinship with the Greek tragiedies. The Plague pre-

sents a naked man-universe confrontation, as does OedipusLRex. Death

of a Salesman presents universal oppression in the attack of old age on

Willy Loman, complicating it with oppression from the social world, as

does Antigone in juxtaposing universal right and social expediency. The 102 .

~,reek view of human fate as "arbitrary, uncertain, and irrational" i t

is the same as Miller's that it is "mutable, accidental, and consequent-

.«103 and Samus's that it is ly of a profoundly arbitrary nature to us"

absurd.

The modern tragic hero, like the Greek hero, is simultaneously

isolated from and involved in a world which he knows too well. Science

has given hia a little understanding of and a limited mastery over the

universe. But science has steadfastly refused to reveal purpose in

the cosmic order. The more modern man learns about his cosmos, the

more he .ealizes that it is up to him to provide the order with motive.

Whatever motive he suggests determines the particular morality of his

tragedy. Rieux, the scientist, assumes no motive and makes his morality

from the action of the moment. Willy, the child of scientific nihil-

ism, attempts to supply a motive and a commandable morality. It works

for him even though it is wrong, but when it is stripped away it nearly

102Ibld.. p. 56.

^Arthur Miller, "The Family in Modern Drama," Atlantic Monthly.,

CXCVII (April, 1956) W.

57

destroys him to create another motive and he ultimately returns to the

old one.

Modern tragedy cannot even offer the positive, if arbitrary, God

force of the Greeks, but only strange, inexplicable, blundering forces.

The universe for the modern poet, especially since Sartre, is as irre-

ducible as the square root of minus one and exactly as irrational.

Despite the fact that man will give it a name (i) and use it in his ac-

tions, he cannot comprehend it. In addition, the modern universe's

relentless perpetual cycle of destruction and reconstitutten of matter

is hostile to all human aspiration; yet man is too feeble to alter this

and too sensitive to tolerate it. He is doomed to make his own law, but

it is without sway. Furthermore, he lives under the constant menace of

that universe which punishes too insistent a quest or too deep an under-

104 standing with annihilation.

It is comprehension of such a relationship as this with a fathom-

less universe that provides both the Greek and the modem hero with a

^eans of moving toward a vision which is tragic. The hero recognizes

the utter indifference of the universe to exceptional merit among men,

the arbitrariness of divine justice, and the cosmic irrelevance of the

individual. Comprehension of the nature of fee —*— •* the uni™«e

provides hin with a challenge, a need to force a relationship with such

a universe, and his free choice to accept that challenge is the begin-

ning of his tragedy. Willy Loman refuses to believe that his value

means nothing to his impersonal boss, Howard Wagner, whose obdurate

indifference infuriates Willy as he demands recognition. "There were

promises made aoross this desk. You mustn't tell me you've got people

XQk Miller, letter to Huftel, quoted in Huftel, pp. 112-3.

58

to see—I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't

p»y my insurance. You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away—a

man is not a piece of fruit!" 5 Like Willy, Rieux meets the challenge

of universal indifference with revolt, as he explains to Tarrou in his

tt\M defense of medicine. "Since the order of the world is regulated by

death, perhaps it would be worth more for God that one not believe in

him, and that one fight with all one's strength against death without

raising one's eyes to the skies where he sits in silence. „106 Both

Willy Loman and Bernard Rieux assert themselves fiercely against uni-

versal silence. Like Oedipus, Rieux refuses to let his city of Oran

suffer further under plague. Willy, by committing suicide, tries to

free Biff and supply him with insight and cash, so that he may impose

order on the chaos with which Willy himself cannot cope. Both modern

heroes, like the Theban king, are seen by Camus to be driven by "a 10?

blind impetus which clamors for order in the midst of chaos."

Artistically, Camus and Miller use two totally different draaatic

configurations as experimental expressions of the hero-universe rela-

tionship. The Plague is a tragedy of external evil, of irrational,

impersonal universal oppression, as is, for example, Romeo and Juliet.

The suffering of Rieux is mostly unmerited, for the most part self.

induced, and he defines himself as a hero by his positive revolt

against that suffering. Rieux is a contemplative hero; like those of

seventeenth-century French tragedy he is totally lucid at the onset of

his hopeless situation add remains so throughout its development. Rieux

105

106

10?

'Death of a Salesman, p. 181.

'la Paste*, p. 103. Translation by this author.

Camus, L'Homme Revolte', p. 21.

I^F

59

cannot be reconciled to his fate, but he does reco^nlae from the begin-

tng Its unalterable injustice. Then he makes the choice to try to defeat

disease, whose power and impersonality make defeat for him a foregone

conclusion. He battles to withstand that defeat, however, with the

greatest intellectual and personal dignity. The hostile universe in

The Plague is directly challenged by aspiring man.

Death of a Salesman, on the other hand, is in part a tragedy of

hamartia; Willy belongs to the class of rash, precipitate heroes who

begin their tragedies by error and find self-awareness in the suffering

that that error brings upon them. It is also, in part, a tragedy of

impersonal evil. Willy faces, in his search for self, a universe which

condemns him to inferiority and then to loss of all ability. He cannot

help a^ing or going senile despite his passionate protest. Willy faces

a second universe in his search for Identity, his social universe, the

machine of Progress, which makes the play a third kind of tragedy, prob-

lematic tragedy, in which universe and hero are equally adamant and

equally at fault. The .justice of Willy»s defeat as a businessman in

seriously questioned, since the universe is little better than Willy

himself. The universe of Progress is capable of being immoral, where

the universe of Rieux is simply amoral. The Plague is a myth of direct

conflict between hero and universe on a metaphysical level. Death of a

Salesman, because it is a social tragedy in its configuration, does not

present a single, clear, universal antagonist, but a series of indestruc-

tible obstacles which frustrate, in differing ways, each of Willy si .

Loman's efforts at self-assertion. Miller has not given Willy a defin-

able Universe; perhaps the play lacks artistic clarity as a tragedy

because of this. However, Miller is concerned with the effect of various

60

absolutes on his striving hero, none of which absolutes is entirely

just. Death of a Salesman is a tragedy similar to those of Euripides,

whose gods are hardly paragons of virtu». Miller is concerned with

the discrepancy between Willy's self and the various things he is

asked to be. The inevitability of his fall is psychologically deter-

mined. Given Willy, who will not sacrifice his fierce idealism to

the rigid machine of Progess, defeat for him is unavoidable. He con-

tains within his stubborn soul the beginning and end of his dream.

The universes of Camus and Miller, are, then, seen to be imper-

sonal, omnipotent, and incomprehensible, though in different ways.

They oppress Rieux and Willy Loman relentlessly and their ultimate

vietory over the heroes is never in question. They follow, therefore,

the Greek pattern of a universe which is tragic. Camus and Miller

have fulfilled the second of the archetypal requirements for tragedy,

the universe, and they have realised the traditional tragic conflict of

hero and universe in their works, even though one is not entirely sure

with Death of a Salesman which of Willy'c conflicts is the ultimate one.

The question becomes, have they also fulfilled the third, the emotional

requirement, by arousing pity and terror with those conflicts and resol-

ving them in such a way that those emotions are purged and transformed

into exaltation?

In The Plague terror is aroused by the inexorable cruelty of the

Plague, which hangs over Rieux's existence as a dry mockery of the futil-

ity of his efforts as he loses patient after patient, child, friend, and

wife. However, the reader also reacts to Rieux's conscientiousness,

sincerity, humility, and dedication to healing with a profound pity.

At the moment of the illness of the Othon child, these two emotions

61

retch their point of sharpest tension. Rieux concentrates all his

-nedical ability and personal strength on the attempt to cure the boy,

the first recipient of the anti-plague serum. After a long, strenuous

battle, he loses the child. It is at this time that his accusations of

divine injustice are most reproachful, his revolt most passionate.

Only the child went on fighting with all his little might. Now and then Rieux took his pulse—less because this served any purpose than as an escape from his utter helplessness— and when he closed his eyes, he could feel its tumult mingling with the fever of his own blood. And then, as one with the tortured child, he struggled to sustain him with all the remaining strength of his own body. But, linked for a few moments, the rhythm of their heartbeats soon fell apart, the child escaped him, and again he knew his impotence... He felt like shouting imprecations—anything to loosen the strangle- hold lashing his heart with steel.

"There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt...And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scene of things in which children are put to torture."108

From this time on, Rieux, and the reader with him, slowly comes to

the understanding that despite the death of the Othon child, Rieux

had done all that was humanly possible to save him, and that was

something, even though it was not enough. Rieux decides that simply

because he continues to fail he must not cease to fight. At the point

of Tarrou's death, which comes after the plague begins its retreat,

the catharsis is complete. Rieux's revolt is not lessened, but it i«

resolved at the point of its final failure into a tranquil compre-

hension.

This human form, his friend's, lacerated by the spear- thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing, superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pesti- lence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck. He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity. And thus, when the end came, the

108 The Plague, pp. 19^, 196, 197.

62

tears that blinded Rieux's eyes were tears of impotence.,.. The next night was not one of struggle, but of silence.15'

Catharsis for Rieux is accomplished at Tarrou's bedside. As he turns

away to face his next obstacle, tranquillity swells to reaffirmation,

which, in its grim sincerity, exalts. "Thus, too, he had lived at

Tarrou's side, and Tarrou had died this evening without their friend-

ship's ever having had time to enter fully into the life of either.

Tarrou had •lost the match' as he put it. But what had he, Rieux

won? No more than the experience 6f having known plague and remem-

bering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing

affection and being destined one day to ramember it. So all a man could

win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memor-

ies. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match."110

The drama of the salesman also awakens pity and tereor. The terror

arises in part from the refusal of the system to tolerate insufficiency

and in part from the knowledge that Willy's dream is his betrayal, that

his blindness is catastrophic. Pity for Willy is aroused by his sin-

cerity, his refusal to accept a role as cipher, his capacity for love.

The two act on each other through the course of the play, as the audi-

ence alternates between anger at Willy and compassion for him. Pity and

terror are purged in the final scene between Willy and his family, in

which Willy is at last able to act meaningfully and rightly. He revels

in the reality 6f Biff's love and the audience finds release in the

humble eagerness with which he destroys himself for his son. Willy, at

the point of his decision to commit suicide, is at peace with himself

and knows exactly what he wants, whether or not what he wants is the

109

110 Ibid., p. 260.

Ibid., p. 262.

63

best goal he could have achieved for himself. As far as Willy is con-

cerned, society has not triumphed over him and he has redeemed himself

for his failure of love. His/>bligation is fulfilled, and that fact is

a source for catharsis and then for exaltation. It is to be ignored

that Willy wrongs his family in his final decision because that decision

is psychologically right for hiji at the point where he arrests his

drama. When Willy cries, "That boy—the boy is going to be magnifi-

cent.,M he is quite magnifleant himself.

Careful examination of The Plague and Death of a Salesman reveals

that they are intense dramas of the lives of two compelling modern men.

3ernard Rieux and Willy Loman, wholly committed in their actions, ster-

ling in their virtiws, pitiable for their frailties, clash heroically

with universes which are similar to that of the Greeks in their silence,

their hostile indifference. The rebel heroes of both play and novel

face those universes with revolt, burden thenselves with crushing res-

ponsibility, come through suffering to an understanding of themselves

and their universes (although in the case of Willy Loman this under-

standing happens to be false), and reaffirm with conviction the great

value of the individual human soul, thus producing catharsis in the

reader and creating from that catharsis a sense of exaltation. They

fulfill the metaphysical, dramatic, and emotional requirements for

tragedy and fulfill them with great power and imagination. The Plague

and Death of a Salesman are landmarks in the effort to create a

twentieth-century tragic literature.

Ill Death of a Salesman, p. 218.

CHAPTER THREE

THE MEASURE OF ARTISTIC SUCCESS

Both The Plague and Death of a Salesman can be defended as tra-

gedies in their configurations of hero, universe, catharsis. However,

as works of tragic art, a genre to which many of the finest literary

artists of the Western world have turned their talents, they must be

examined for their degree of artistic success. The details of the

dramatic presentation of these two works—their realism, their ideo-

logies their verbal content, and their owerriding tones—all must be

evaluated to see how these elements contribute to or detract from

their tragic quality.

The Plague and Death of a Salesman both belong to the realistic

tradition in literature, and they attempt to strike a balance between

verisimilitude and and imaginative treatment. To what extent a realis-

tic approach contributes to tragedy and in what measure it interferes

with it are valid questions to consider in evaluating the success of

the novel and play as tragedies.

In the first place, tragedy itself is essentially a realistic

literature. It is a literary form glorifying in qua si-religious terms

a man who serves as a realistic symbol for his civilisation. Tragedy

may be abstract, but it may never be grounded in fantasy. Whatever

metaphysical considerations it may treat, it must dramatize the reality

of suffering in life, punishment of crime, and the sacrifices which

must be made to enforce order upon chaos.112 Since the art of tragedy

attempts to explain the human condition, it must be based on human

experience; it is, after all, experience of tragedy in life which first,

inspires the poet's vision. The action of tragedy must be a life

rhythm. The presentation of the dramatic situation has ranged histori-

112Gassner, p. 60.

65

cally in technique from detailed verisimilitude to extreme illusionism;

literary presentation is relative to the aesthetics of the given cul-

ture. There is no style of presentation, however, which is neces-

sarily more tragic than another as long as theme is not lost in details.

Despite the skepticism of traditionalists, the merciless realism

of The Plague does not obscure its tragedy, since the configuration of

of the salvation of a trouble-stricken people is a familiar tragic

myth. Even the naturalistic overtones in Death of a Salesman are not

anti-tragic as long as society is not actually blamed for Willy's catas-

trophe. The realistic trend in literature is, in fact, encouraging for

tragedy. The best tragic poets find plots which are working metaphors

for the life of their times, and close proximity of literature to life

will gove the modern poet ample opportunity to recognize the *ery real

presence of the tragic in the world and transform it into art.

Yet the conflict of a given tragedy must not be so familiar that

it loses power. It must be universal in scope and fix the blame for

the defeat on cosmological oppression and human failing, neither of

which is contingent upon any specific milieu. The spectator must not

be so involved in the action of the moment that he cannot see the hero's

actions in their universal coneext. The audience's emotional involvement

with the hero must be counterbalanced by intellectual distance which is

provided by the clear symbolism, the archetypal configuration; of a

good tragic plot. Insistence upon distance as a balance to realism is

vital in order to keep tragedy from being temporary in outlook; the

realistic plot should be transformed into a universal metaphor.

The Plague has attempted to establish a sense of distance and avoid

113 Ibid., p. 23.

the appearance of temporality by treating an extraordinary situation.

Plague, metaphorically speaking, and resistance to it make a drama to

which any age is sasceptible, but which is by no means commonplace. A

sepii-all«?orical presentation in the Camus novel of a universal problem

suggests to the reader that his intellectual reaction to the novel

should override his emotional one in his judgment of it as a whole.

The Plague, within its realistic framework, contains aesthetic distance

because of the clearly metaphoric nature of the situation which it

treats.

Miller, with Death of a Salesman, has failed in part to compensate

for the familiarity of his tragedy by not imbuing it with a recognizable

larger meaning than that afforded by the actual plot. He has failed to

make it absolutely clear to the audience that the plot is a metaphor.

Death of a Salesman treats an ordinary situation which does not suggest

to every reader that it is more than ordinary. There is nothing to

deny tragedy to ordinary situations per se, but their tendency to des-

troy audience perspective is dangerous. Death of a Salesman is so life-

like a drama that its universal dilemma is often difficult to abstract

from the contemporary problem with which it daals. What is lost on

many critics is that the mechanized uMverse which destroys Willy Loman

could as easily be any other universe; it is his reaction to annihila-

tion which counts. The particular metaphoric combatants in a tragic

battle should be familiar, but the duel they wage in the plot should be

weighed primarily as symbolic, secondarily as realistic. Miller may

have intended Willy to be a symbol, but he did not make that fact ex-

plicit in his play.

The fact that Willy is too familiar a figure from life to be pro-

67

perly distant from the reader is complicated by the fact that he is

also a familiar figure from literature. Miller has encountered diffi-

culty in his attempt to create a tragedy of the "little man" primarily

because the "little man" has been so long and intimately associated

with naturalistic drama. Miller has been unable to prevent his hero

from behaving animalistically or mechanistically simply because he is

not a great intellectual of the sort commonly found in tragedy, but is

like the unperceptive heroes of the naturalistic drama. In addition,

willy's intelligence is always suspect as being unconscious, not entirely

because of pre.judioton the part of the audience, but because Miller him-

self strongly suggests it.

Death of a Salesman is, in short, nearly as schizophrenic as its

hero, //illy is tragic, as has been indicated, but he is also exceedingly

pathetic, victimized by Progress. It is possible to avoid blaming

society for Willy's misfortune if one interprets the character of Howard

sympathetically, but he is clearly written as a selfieh, preoccupied,

thoughtless individual with slightly under average intelligence and eome

•neasure of sales ability. Such a boss as this complicates the inevita-

bility of Willy*s defeat by the indirect accusation that the universe

need not have let it happen. Willy begging Howard for even a token

salary, progressively asking less and less, is vaguely like Lear wander-

ing from Goneril to Regan for permission to keep his retinue of one ■nii

hundred knights, one of the last vestiges of his kingship. Neither

Lear's daughters nor Willy's boss need be quite so unbending as they

are; their cruelty only emphasizes the feebleness of the two heroes,

displaying them in a light in which they reveal no human majesty what-

11*. Siegal, p. 3^3.

68

soever. In King Lear the pathetic elements remain enigmatic; in Death

of a Salesman they are the irritating product of Miller's socialistic

leanings at the time of the play's composition. Miller insists that the

play is neither Marxist nor naturalistic, " and even Joseph Wood

Krutch, in his critique of Death of a Salesman, feels that society is

not accused of a crime in the destruction of Willy Loman, 16 but

nevertheless these ideas are hinted at in the play and are unresolved.

Miller is unable to out the umbilical cord connecting him with the natur-

alists and he is also unable to recognize alien matter in the composi-

tion of Death of a Salesman and rake it mercilessly out. He has sin-

cerely attempted to preserve a realistic form of presentation in the

play without accompanying naturalistic prejudices, but he is not entirely

willing to give up the parts of those prejudices which still appeal to

hin. As a result he sacrifices artistic clarity and weakens the total

117 impact of the play. '

Not only does Miller bring his penchant for naturalism to the tra-

gedy of the "little man," but he also has artistic problems with it.

He is troubled by the tension between the need to create intellectual

distance for the audience and the inarticulateness of his hero. He has

made an effort to reconcile the two by external artistic details and by

his use of language in the play. The artistic details by which Miller

attempts to eliminate this tension are extensive, obvious symbolism,

simultaneous past and present time, musical themes, and the imaginative

setting and lighting of memory. He uses these effects to try to trans-

115Miller, Introduction, pp. 27-9.

ll6"Drama," Nation, CLXVIII (March 5, 19^9) 283.

117 Bentley, p. 82.

figure the realistic drama of the salesman into a parable. However, no

timber of technical devices compensates for the basic failure of Miller

to write a tragic parable. He has undermined his own sincere effort to

create distance by hammering away at the inhumanity of Willy's company

and the hero's own senility, which are personal, not universal charac-

teristics. It is unclear exactly what Willy does stand for, elnce he

himself does not say. The result of Willy's silence is a melange of

values, none of which is clearly ultimate, and from this fact results

a great division of critical opinion on the play. It is socialistic to

a Marxist critic, deterministic to a naturalist, and Oedipal to a

Freudian, ideologies none of which is particularly compatible with its

tragedy.

In addition to using artistic techniques in an attempt to establish

distance by showing an ultimate value in Willy's drama, Miller also

seels aesthetic distance through the use of two kinds of language in

the play. He has given Willy dialogue appropriate to the speech habits

of the lower middle-class salesman, but he has also loaded the play with

long poetic passage*, attempting to provide Death of a Salesman with the

richness of language critically considered appropriate for high tragedy.

He uses trite expressions, hoping that the passion of their utterance

will bathe their familiarity in a totally new light. Reinvigorated

banality is the style of nearly all of Happy Loman's serious dialogue

and of Biff's descriptions of the West: "There's nothing more inspiring

or—beautiful than the sight of a mare and a new colt." Miller also

saddles Willy, Linda, Biff, and-Charley with long speeches uncomfortably

laden with images. For example, Willy's reminiscence about Biff's cham- •

U8De ath of a Salesman, p. 138.

?o

pionship football game begins: "Like a young god. Hercules, something

like that. And the sun, the sun all around him."119 His dreams of dia-

mond mines in Africa are equally oratorieal. Miller*s intentions are

good, but the truth is that Willy is far more vibrant a hero when he is

crying out in his most simple prose, with throbbing verbs, than when he

is mouthing cliches or waxing eloquent in a long series of banal, non-

active adjectives. It is rhythm which counts in tragedy, and the rhythm

of Lilly's drama is in action, not in speech. Miller, whose strength is

120 in the re-creation of profound emotion, makes his own play somewhat

artificial by phrasing it in language which is essentially divorced from

that emotion.

Camus, in contrast, has kept the two kinds of language successfully

apart in The Plague by using the novel form. He indulges his capacity

for lyrical expression in descriptive passages which lend grandeur to

the action, such as this picture of the night after the death of Tarrou:

"Outside, it was the same cold night, frosty stars in a clear and icy

sky. In the half-lit room, one could sense the cold pressing on the 121

glass, the pale breath of a polar night." However, Camus's dialogue

itself is terse, idiomatic, and natural. Camus's dialogue, because he

has created it as the spontaneous, non-literary expression of the intense

feelings of articulate characters, carries those characters' passions to

the audience without letting those passions seem predictable or artifi-

cial. Realism of language makes an ideal means for Camus to make a uni-

versal story personal. For Miller, however, neither conscious artistry

119 Death of a Salesman, p. 171»

120 Moss, p. 108.

121La Peste. p. 232. Translation by this author.

71

nor realism of language is completely appropriate for making a personal

story universal.

It is clear, then, that the tragedy in both works is allied to a

realistic presentation, although The Plague, moving from a universal

problem to a realistic drama, appears to be the more effective presen-

tation. Both novel and play affirm universal values. The Plague advan-

ces one value, revolt, which leads to responsibility and reaffiraation.

Death of a Salesman also affirms the value of revolt, but it contains

naturalistic, socialistic, and Freudian values as well. None of these

three value systems overshadows the tragic pattern of hero, universe,

catharsis, but they are noticeable enough in the play to blur that pat-

tern. Both works seem to attempt to balance realistic with symbolic

language, The Plague with more success than Death of a Salesman because

of the freedom of the novel form, but without the verbal artistry of

earlier writers of tragedy.

Although The Plague and Death of a Salesman exhibit formal charac-

teristics of tragedy, the fact that they treat ordinary men and phrase

the tragedies of those men in the non-lyrical idiom appropriate to them,

as well as including non-tragic elements in their lives, causes them to

belong to the form of low tragedy. But although they are inferior as

literature to Sophoclean or Shakespearean tragic expression, their moti-

vating spirits are as tragic as the visions which inspired greater poets.

Death of a Salesman is an attempt to rephrase the traditional art

of tragedy in modern terms, as its seeming imitation of the Lear and

even the Oedipus stories indicates. Where Miller attempts to impose

traditional artistic forms or his own beliefs on the independent and

vigorous story of Willy Loman, the play fails. When he lets Willy tell

72

his own story, in his own language, it is successful, because Miller

has captured a modern man in a dilemma which is truly tragic. The

monster of Progress in the play, as in life, is turning on its creator

with its own sort of morality. Willy's struggle not to be crushed by

that monster denies Miller*s own suggestion that what happens to him

is hopelessly determined by his low level of competence. It lends

universality and realism both to Willy's other tragic struggles as a

man who must die and as a man who has failed to live his life to its

fullest advantage. Willy is small, but science has made man small.

His determination and hope of better things are every bit as passionate

as the determination and hope of kings. He cannot be tragic in the

save words as a king, a fact which Miller lost sight of when he was

writing the play, as can be clearly seen. However, the symbolic battle

of Willy Loman outshines the unnatural dialogue of the play. Despite

the limitations of Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman insists on being

tragedy.

the Plague, too, is far from the majestic chants of the glory of

man which Joseph Wood Krutch so admires, but it does not pretend, as

does Death of a Salesman, to try to revive the». It is a saga of the

fate of modern man, which, surprisingly enough, appears in retrospect

to be a tragedy. It is a grim sort of tragedy, however, treating as

it does a period of wholesale destruction and total despair. The

brutality of the universe, which the Sreeks refrained from staging,

is explored by Camus in all its grotesque reality. And there is only

one slim ray of hope in all the earnage, made available to two intel-

ligent and likeable men, only one of whom survives, and that is the

hope that because man exists, whatever he chooses to do is worth some-

73

thing because he has done it. This is the real tragedy of modern man,

based on the tragic fallacy reframed to include science. Man, able

because of his intelligence to conceive of his suspended existence as

tragic and thus to write tragedy, is able in some measure with art to

understand and fight the limits of his intelligence and his mortality.

For centuries Man believed that he had a special role; today he rebels

against the fact that he does not. The Plague and Death of a Salesman

as works of art reveal that expressions of the power and passion of

that revolt make new and meaningful tragedy.

BI3LI0GRAPHY

Primary Sources

Camus, Albert. L'Homme Revolt*. Paris, 1951.

Camus, Albert. Lettres k un ami allemand. Lausanne, 1946.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin 0*Brien. New York, 1955.

Camus, Albert. La Peste. Paris, 1947.

Camus, Albert. The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York, 1948.

Camus, Albert. Resistance. Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin 0»Brien, New York, 1961.

Miller, Arthur. Collected Plays. New York, 1957.

Miller, Arthur. "On Social Plays," A View from the Bridge. New York, 1955.

Miller, Arthur. "The Family in Modern Drama," Atlantic Monthly. CXCVII (April, 1956) 35-41.

"iller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man," New York Times, Feb. 27, 1949, Sec. II, pp. 1, 3.

Secondary Sources

Aristotle. Poetics, trans. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor, 1967.

Bantley, Eric. In Search of Theatre. New York, 1954.

3iernan, Judah, Hart, James, and Johnson, Stanley. The Dramatic Exper- ience. Snglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1958.

iree, Germaine. Albert Camus. New York, 1964.

Cluman, Harold. Lies Like Truth. New York, 1958.

Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Tragedy; Vision and Form. San Francisco, 1965.

Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. New York, I960.

?rye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J., 1957.

Gassner, John. Theatre at the Crossroads. New York, 1963.

Glicksberg, C. I. The Tragic Vision in Twentieth-Century Literature. Carbondale, 1963.

Huftel, Sheila. Arthur Miller: The Burning Glass. New York, I965.

Hurrell, John D., ed. Two Modem American Tragedies. New York, 1961.

Kitchin, Laurence. Mid-Century Drama. London, i960.

Krutoh, Joseph Wood. "Drama," Nation. CLXVIII (March 5, 19^9) 283-**.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Modem Temper. New York, 1929.

Mandel, Oscar. A Definition of Tragedy. New York, 1961.

Maquot, Albert. Albert Camus; ou, 1*invincible 4t4. Paris, 1955.

McCollom, William 3. Tragedy. New York, 1957.

Moss, Leonard. Arthur Miller. New York, 1967.

Muller, Herbert J. The Spirit of Tragedy. New York, 1956.

Murray, Edward. Arthur Miller; Dramatist. New York, 1967.

Peyre, Henri. French Novelists of Today. New York, 1967.

Sewall, Richard B. The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven, 1959.

Siegal, Paul N. "Willy Loman and King Lear," College English. XVII (March, 1956) 3^1-5.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New York, 1961.

Thody, Philip. Albert Camus: A Study of his Work. London, 1957.

"Untragic America," Anon, editorial, Life (December 2, 19**6) p. 32.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London, 1966.

Yale French Studies, no. 1. Existentialism.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY—LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED

Artstotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher. 4th —St New York, 1951.

Aylen, Leo. Greek Tragedy and the Modern World. London, 1964.

Bentley, firic. "Theatre," New Republic. CXXXIII (December 19, 1955) 21-2.

Bettina, Sister M. "Willy Loman's Brother Ben: Tragic Insight in Death of a Salesman," Modern Drama, IV (February, 1962) 409-12.

Booth, Wayne. "Macbeth as Tragic Hero," Journal of General Sducation (October, 1951) PP. 17-25.

Bree, Germaine. Camus. New Brunswick, N.J., 1959.

3ree, Germaine,6(kCamus: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962. "

3ree, Germaine and Guiton, Margaret. An Age of Fiction. New Bruns- wick, N.J., 1957.

3risville, Jean-Claude. Camus. Paris, 1959.

Brown, John Mason. Still Seeing Things. New York, 1950.

Brustein, Robert Sanford. The Theatre of Revolt. Boston, 1964.

Coufctney, I*. L. The Idea of Tragedy in Ancient and Modern Drama. New fork, 1900.

Dixon, W. Macneile. Tragedy. London, 1924.

Downer, Alan 3. American Drama and its Critics. Chicago, 1965.

Downer, Alan S. Fifty Years of American Drama. Chicago, 1951.

Driver, Tom F. "Strength and Weakness in Arthur Miller," Tulane Drama Review. IV (May, I960) 45-52.

Fowlie, Wallace. Clowns and Angels. New York, 1943.

Fowlia, Wallace. Dionysus in Paris. New York, I960.

Findlater, Richard. "No Time for Tragedy?" Twentieth Century, CLXI (January, 1957) 56-66.

Sadourek, Carina. Les Innocents et les Couplables. The Hague, 1963.

Sanz, Arthur. "The Silence of Arthur Miller," Drama Survey. Ill (October, I963) 224-37.

Gassner, John. Theatre in Our Times. New York, 195^.

Ginestier, Paul. La Pensoe de Camus. Paris, 1964.

Gould, Jean ft. Modern American Playwrights. New York,.1966.

Hagopian, John A. "Arthur Miller: The Salesman's Two Cases," Modern Drama, VI (September, 1963) 117-25.

Hanna, Thomas. The Thought and Art of Albert Camus. Chicago, 1958.

Hathorn, Richmond Yancey. Tragedy. Myth, and Mystery. Bloomington, 1962.

Hatzfeld, Helmut. Trends and Styles in Twentieth-Century Literature. Washington, 1957.

Henn, Thomas Rice. The Harvest of Tragedy. London, 1956.

Hogan, Robert Goode. Arthur Miller. Minneapolis, 1964.

Hynes, Joseph A. "Attention Must Be Paid...," College English, XXIII (April, 1962) 574-8.

Hynes, Joseph A. "Arthur Miller and the Impasse of Naturalism," Southern Atlantic Quarterly, LXII, 1963. 327-34.

Jackson, Esther M. "Death of a Salesman: Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre," College Language Association Journal. VII (September, 1963) 63-76.

Johnson, Stanley, Bierman, Judah, and Hart, James. The Play and the Reader. Snglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966.

Jones, Robert Emmet. The Alienated Hero in Modern French Drama. Athens, Ga., 1962.

Kernodle, George R. "The Death of the Little Man," Tulane Drama Review. I (January, 1956) 47-60.

King;; Adele. Camus. New York, 1965.

Lawrence, Stephan A. "The Right Dream in Miller«s Death of a Salesman." College Snglish. XXV, 1964, pp. 547-9.

Lewis, Allan. American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre. New York, 1965.

Lewis, Richard Warrington. The Picaresque Saint. Philadelphia, 1959.

Lucas, Frank Laurence. Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics. New York, 1928.

Luppe", Robert de. Albert Camus. Paris, I960.

Mander, John. The Writer and Commitment. Philadelphia, 1962.

Mason, H. A. "M. Camus and the Tragic Hero," Scrutiny (December, 19^6) pp. 82-9.

McAnany, G. Emile. "The Tragic Commitment,H Modern Drama. V (Kay, 1962) 11-20.

McSlroy, Davis Dunbar. Existentialism and Modern Literature. New fork, 1963.

Michel, Laurence Anthony#£ Tragedy; Modern Essays in Criticism. Snglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963.

Moore, Harry T. Twentieth-Century Literature. 2 vols. Carbondale, 1966.

Mounier, Emmanuel. L'espoir des d£sesp<rees. Paris, 1953.

Myers, Henry Alonzo. Tragedy; A View of Life. Ithaca, N.Y., 1956.

Nathan, George Jean. The Magic Mirror. New York, I960.

Olson, Elder. Tragedy and the Theory of Drama. Detroit, .961.

Parker, Emmett. Albert Camus, the artist in the arena. Madison, Wise, 1965.

Peyre, Henri. The Contemporary French Novel. New York, 1955.

Prudhoe, John. "Arthur Miller and the Tradition of Tragedy," English Studies. XLIII, 1962, pp. 430-9.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'Sxistentialisme est un humanisme. Paris, 19^*6.

Simon, Pierre Henri. L'Homme en Procfes. NeGchatel, 1951.

Tynan, Kenneth. Curtains. New York, 1961.

Waite, Harlow 0., and Atkinson, Benjamin P., eds. Literature for Our Time. 3rd ed. New York, 1958.

Veales, Gerald. "Arthur Miller: Man and his Image," Tulane Drama Review. VII (Fall, 1962) 165-80.

tforsley, T. C. "Poetry Without Words," New Statesman and Nation, XXXVIII (Spring, 19^9).

Yale French,Studies, no. 25. Albert Camus.